What is the temperature of an ultra-cold Rydberg plasma?

Abstract

We have measured the asymptotic expansion velocities of ultra-cold plasmas (UNPs) which evolve from cold, dense, samples of Rydberg rubidium atoms using ion time-of-flight spectroscopy. From this, we have obtained values for the initial plasma electron temperature as functions of the original Rydberg atom density and binding energy. Our results show that the electron temperature is determined principally by the plasma environment when the UNP decouples from the Rydberg atoms, which occurs when the plasma electrons become too cold to ionize the remaining Rydberg population. Furthermore, the dependence of the electron temperature on Rydberg atom density gives strong indirect evidence for the existence of a bottleneck in the spectrum of Rydberg states that coexist with a cold plasma.

This paper is superseded by arXiv:1711.09797

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Expansion Dynamics of Cold Non-Neutral Plasma
• Formation of ultracold ion pairs through long-range Rydberg molecules
• Dissipative dynamics of atomic and molecular Rydberg gases: Avalanche to ultracold plasma states of strong coupling
• Heating and cooling of electrons in an ultracold neutral plasma using Rydberg atoms