Spectral Line Width Broadening from Pair Fluctuation in a Frozen Rydberg Gas

Abstract

Spectral line width broadening in Rydberg gases, a phenomenon previously attributed to the many-body effect, was observed experimentally almost a decade ago. The observed line width was typically 80-100 times larger than the average interaction strength predicted from a binary interaction. The interpretation of such a phenomenon is usually based on the so-called diffusion model, where the line width broadening mostly originates from the diffusion of excitations. In this paper, we present a model calculation to show that diffusion is not the main mechanism to the line width broadening. We find that the rare pair fluctuation at small separation is the dominant factor contributing to this broadening. Our results give a width of about 20-30 times larger than the average interaction strength. More importantly, by turning off the diffusion process, we do not observe order of magnitude change in the spectral line width.

References in corpus (8)

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Dipole blockade in a cold Rydberg atomic sample
• Observation of the Stark-tuned Forster resonance between two Rydberg atoms
• Superradiance in Inverted Multi-level Atomic Clouds
• Stark-tuned Förster resonance and dipole blockade for two to five cold Rydberg atoms: Monte Carlo simulations for various spatial configurations
• Arrested relaxation in an isolated molecular ultracold plasma
• The effect of random positions for dipole hopping through a Rydberg gas
• Experimental realization of a 3D long-range random hopping model
• Time dependence of few-body Förster interactions among ultracold Rydberg atoms
• Active Suppression of Quantum Dephasing in Resonantly Driven Ensembles
• Coherent excitation of three-atom entangled states near a two-body Förster resonance