Quantum gas microscopy of Rydberg macrodimers

Abstract

A microscopic understanding of molecules is essential for many fields of natural sciences but their tiny size hinders direct optical access to their constituents. Rydberg macrodimers - bound states of two highly-excited Rydberg atoms - feature bond lengths easily exceeding optical wavelengths. Here we report on the direct microscopic observation and detailed characterization of such macrodimers in a gas of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice. The size of about 0.7 micrometers, comparable to the size of small bacteria, matches the diagonal distance of the lattice. By exciting pairs in the initial two-dimensional atom array, we resolve more than 50 vibrational resonances. Using our spatially resolved detection, we observe the macrodimers by correlated atom loss and demonstrate control of the molecular alignment by the choice of the vibrational state. Our results allow for precision testing of Rydberg interaction potentials and establish quantum gas microscopy as a powerful new tool for quantum chemistry.

arXiv comment13 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (26)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Quantum information with Rydberg atoms
• Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator
• Single-Atom Resolved Fluorescence Imaging of an Atomic Mott Insulator
• Probing the Superfluid to Mott Insulator Transition at the Single Atom Level
• Realizing quantum Ising models in tunable two-dimensional arrays of single Rydberg atoms
• Creation of ultracold molecules from a Fermi gas of atoms
• Single-Spin Addressing in an Atomic Mott Insulator
• ARC: An open-source library for calculating properties of alkali Rydberg atoms
• Strong dissipation inhibits losses and induces correlations in cold molecular gases
• Suppression of Excitation and Spectral Broadening Induced by Interactions in a Cold Gas of Rydberg Atoms
• Many-body interferometry of a Rydberg-dressed spin lattice
• Building one molecule from a reservoir of two atoms
• Creation of a low-entropy quantum gas of polar molecules in an optical lattice
• Probing quench dynamics across a quantum phase transition into a 2D Ising antiferromagnet
• Macrodimers: ultralong range Rydberg molecules
• Tutorial: Calculation of Rydberg interaction potentials
• Quantum magnetism and topological ordering via enhanced Rydberg-dressing near Förster-resonances
• Ultracold Rydberg Molecules
• Coherent Control of Bond Making
• Observation of Rydberg-atom macrodimers: micrometer-sized diatomic molecules
• Dissipative Binding of Lattice Bosons through Distance-Selective Pair Loss
• Long-range potentials and $(n-1)d+ns$ molecular resonances in an ultracold rydberg gas
• Three-body bound states in dipole-dipole interacting Rydberg atoms
• Rubidium Rydberg macrodimers
• Rubidium Rydberg linear macrotrimers

Cited by in corpus (44)

• Quantum gas microscopy for single atom and spin detection
• A concise review of Rydberg atom based quantum computation and quantum simulation
• Transverse-Field Ising Dynamics in a Rydberg-Dressed Atomic Gas
• Fast multi-qubit gates by adiabatic evolution in interacting excited state manifolds
• Quantum nonlinear optics based on two-dimensional Rydberg atom arrays
• Laser Trapping of Circular Rydberg Atoms
• Realizing distance-selective interactions in a Rydberg-dressed atom array
• Rydberg superatoms: An artificial quantum system for quantum information processing and quantum optics
• Field-linked resonances of polar molecules
• Spatial imaging of a novel type of molecular ions
• Interaction-induced lattices for bound states: Designing flat bands, quantized pumps and higher-order topological insulators for doublons
• Long-range Rydberg-atom-ion molecules of Rb and Cs
• Quantum Register of Fermion Pairs
• Long-range atom-ion Rydberg molecule: A novel molecular binding mechanism
• Ultrafast creation of overlapping Rydberg electrons in an atomic BEC and Mott-insulator lattice
• Observation of vibrational dynamics of orientated Rydberg-atom-ion molecules
• Emergent quantum correlations and collective behavior in non-interacting quantum systems subject to stochastic resetting
• Self-Ordering of Individual Photons in Waveguide QED and Rydberg-Atom Arrays
• Vibronic interactions in trilobite and butterfly Rydberg molecules
• Observation of photoassociation resonances in ultracold atom-molecule collisions
• Few-body analogue quantum simulation with Rydberg-dressed atoms in optical lattices
• Microscopic electronic structure tomography of Rydberg macrodimers
• Rydberg Composites
• Non-adiabatic decay of Rydberg-atom-ion molecules
• Non-adiabatic interaction effects in the spectra of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules
• Extended coherently delocalized states in a frozen Rydberg gas
• Efficient variational approach to dynamics of a spatially extended bosonic Kondo model
• Rydberg Noisy-Dressing and applications in making soliton-molecules and droplet quasi-crystals
• $f$-wave superfluidity from repulsive interaction in Rydberg-dressed Fermi gas
• Rydberg Macrodimers: Diatomic molecules on the micrometer scale
• Individual assembly of two-species Rydberg molecules using optical tweezers
• Kato's theorem and ultralong-range Rydberg molecules
• Microwave photo-association of fine-structure-induced Rydberg $(n+2)D_{5/2}n{F}_J$ macro-dimer molecules of cesium
• Hyperfine Structure of $n{P}_{1/2}$ Rydberg States in ${}^{85}$Rb
• Casimir--Polder induced Rydberg macrodimers
• Kernel-Function Based Quantum Algorithms for Finite Temperature Quantum Simulation
• High-resolution imaging of Rydberg atoms in optical lattices using an aspheric-lens objective in vacuum
• Rydberg-dressed Fermi liquid: correlations and signatures of droplet crystallization
• Exotic photonic molecules via Lennard-Jones-like potentials
• Nonadiabatic decay of metastable states on coupled linear potentials
• Tunable pairing with local spin-dependent Rydberg molecule potentials in an atomic Fermi superfluid
• Ring Rydberg Composites
• Forces on alkali Rydberg atoms due to non-linearly polarized light
• Coherently delocalized states in dipole interacting Rydberg ensembles: the role of internal degeneracies