Ion Imaging via Long-Range Interaction with Rydberg Atoms

Abstract

We demonstrate imaging of ions in an atomic gas with ion-Rydberg atom interaction induced absorption. This is made possible by utilizing a multi-photon electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) scheme and the extremely large electric polarizability of a Rydberg state with high orbital angular momentum. We process the acquired images to obtain the distribution of ion clouds and to spectroscopically investigate the effect of the ions on the EIT resonance. Furthermore, we show that our method can be employed to image the dynamics of ions in a time resolved way. As an example, we map out the avalanche ionization of a gas of Rydberg atoms. The minimal disruption and the flexibility offered by this imaging technique make it ideally suited for the investigation of cold hybrid ion-atom systems.

11 pages, 4 + 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator
• Cooperative atom-light interaction in a blockaded Rydberg ensemble
• Electric-field induced dipole blockade with Rydberg atoms
• Spontaneous avalanche ionization of a strongly blockaded Rydberg gas

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• Towards implementation of a magic optical-dipole trap for confining ground-state and Rydberg-state cesium cold atoms
• Interaction-enhanced transmission imaging with Rydberg atoms
• Hybrid quantum memory leveraging slow-light and gradient-echo duality
• Microwave transitions in atomic sodium: Radiometry and polarimetry using the sodium layer
• Fast Single-shot Imaging of Individual Ions via Homodyne Detection of Rydberg-Blockade-Induced Absorption