Few-Body Bound States of Dipole-Dipole Interacting Rydberg Atoms

Abstract

We show that the resonant dipole-dipole interaction can give rise to bound states between two and three Rydberg atoms with non-overlapping electron clouds. The dimer and trimer states arise from avoided level crossings between states converging to different fine structure manifolds in the limit of separated atoms. We analyze the angular dependence of the potential wells, characterize the quantum dynamics in these potentials and discuss methods for their production and detection. Typical distances between the atoms are of the order of several micrometers which can be resolved in state-of-the-art experiments. The potential depths and typical oscillation frequencies are about one order of magnitude larger as compared to the dimer and trimer states investigated in [PRA $\text{86}$ 031401(R) (2012)] and [PRL $\text{111}$ 233003 (2014)], respectively. We find that the dimer and trimer molecules can be aligned with respect to the axis of a weak electric field.

10 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of mesoscopic crystalline structures in a two-dimensional Rydberg gas
• Quasiclassical calculations of BBR-induced depopulation rates and effective lifetimes of Rydberg nS, nP and nD alkali-metal atoms with n < 80
• Consequences of Zeeman Degeneracy for van der Waals Blockade between Rydberg Atoms
• The Efimov effect for three interacting bosonic dipoles

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Observation of Rydberg-atom macrodimers: micrometer-sized diatomic molecules
• Long-range interactions between rubidium and potassium Rydberg atoms
• Bound states of a light atom and two heavy dipoles in two dimensions