Anomalous excitation facilitation in inhomogeneously broadened Rydberg gases

Abstract

When atomic gases are laser driven to Rydberg states in an off resonant way, a single Rydberg atom may enhance the excitation rate of surrounding atoms. This leads to a facilitated excitation referred to as Rydberg anti-blockade. In the usual facilitation scenario, the detuning of the laser from resonance compensates the interaction shift. Here, we discuss a different excitation mechanism, which we call anomalous facilitation. This occurs on the "wrong side" of the resonance and originates from inhomogeneous broadening. The anomalous facilitation may be seen in experiments of attractively interacting atoms on the blue detuned side, where facilitation is not expected to appear.

arXiv comment5 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Dissipation induced dipole blockade and anti-blockade in driven Rydberg systems
• Spontaneous avalanche dephasing in large Rydberg ensembles
• Black-body radiation induced facilitated excitation of Rydberg atoms in optical tweezers
• Finite-size scaling of the photon-blockade breakdown dissipative quantum phase transition
• Observation of many-body dynamics of Rydberg atoms based on antiblockade using two-color excitation
• Many-body radiative decay in strongly interacting Rydberg ensembles
• Anomalous excitation enhancement with Rydberg-dressed atoms
• Deterministic facilitated excitation of the weakly-driven atom in heteronuclear Rydberg atom pairs beyond antiblockade