Depletion Imaging of Rydberg atoms in cold atomic gases

Abstract

We present a depletion imaging technique to map out the spatial and temporal dependency of the density distribution of an ultracold gas of Rydberg atoms. Locally resolved absorption depletion, observed through differential ground state absorption imaging of a ${}^{87}\text{Rb}$ cloud in presence and absence of pre-excited Rydberg atoms, reveals their projected two-dimensional distribution. By employing a closed two-level optical transition uncoupled from the Rydberg state, the highly excited atoms are preserved during imaging. We measure the excitation dynamics of the $|48S⟩$ state of ${}^{87}\text{Rb}$, observing a saturation of the two-dimensional Rydberg density. Such outcome can be explained by the Rydberg blockade effect which prevents resonant excitation of close-by Rydberg atoms due to strong dipolar interactions. By combining the superatom description, where atoms within a blockade radius are represented as collective excitations, with a Monte Carlo sampling, we can quantitatively model the observed excitation dynamics and infer the full three-dimensional distribution of Rydberg atoms, that can serve as a starting point for quantum simulation of many-body dynamics involving Rydberg spin systems.

arXiv comment12 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (33)

• Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator
• Observation of Rydberg blockade between two atoms
• Observation of collective excitation of two individual atoms in the Rydberg blockade regime
• Realizing quantum Ising models in tunable two-dimensional arrays of single Rydberg atoms
• Local Blockade of Rydberg Excitation in an Ultracold Gas
• Observation of mesoscopic crystalline structures in a two-dimensional Rydberg gas
• High-fidelity control and entanglement of Rydberg atom qubits
• Suppression of Excitation and Spectral Broadening Induced by Interactions in a Cold Gas of Rydberg Atoms
• Evidence for coherent collective Rydberg excitation in the strong blockade regime
• Dipole blockade in a cold Rydberg atomic sample
• Dynamical crystallization in a low-dimensional Rydberg gas
• Consequences of Zeeman Degeneracy for van der Waals Blockade between Rydberg Atoms
• Effective operator formalism for open quantum systems
• Observation of coherent many-body Rabi oscillations
• Strong saturation absorption imaging of dense clouds of ultracold atoms
• Many-Body Quantum Spin Dynamics with Monte Carlo Trajectories on a Discrete Phase Space
• Probing quench dynamics across a quantum phase transition into a 2D Ising antiferromagnet
• Many-body dynamics of dipolar molecules in an optical lattice
• Demonstration of a strong Rydberg blockade in three-atom systems with anisotropic interactions
• Near Resonant Spatial Images of Confined Bose-Einstein Condensates in the '4D' Magnetic Bottle
• Rabi oscillations and excitation trapping in the coherent excitation of a mesoscopic frozen Rydberg gas
• Interaction enhanced imaging of individual atoms embedded in dense atomic gases
• Universal scaling in a strongly interacting Rydberg gas
• The anisotropic Heisenberg model in a transverse magnetic field
• Imaging the evolution of an ultracold strontium Rydberg gas
• Non-destructive Faraday imaging of dynamically controlled ultracold atoms
• Number-resolved imaging of excited-state atoms using a scanning autoionization microscope
• Many-body Rabi oscillations of Rydberg excitation in small mesoscopic samples
• Uncovering the non-equilibrium phase structure of an open quantum spin system
• Two-body interactions and decay of three-level Rydberg-dressed atoms
• Density matrix reconstruction of three-level atoms via Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency
• Rydberg tomography of an ultra-cold atomic cloud
• Interaction-Enhanced Imaging of Rydberg P states

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Glassy dynamics in a disordered Heisenberg quantum spin system
• Floquet Hamiltonian Engineering of an Isolated Many-Body Spin System
• Nonlinear absorption in interacting Rydberg electromagnetically-induced-transparency spectra on two-photon resonance
• Optimal control in phase space applied to minimal-time transfer of thermal atoms in optical traps
• Coherent optical two-photon resonance tomographic imaging in three dimensions
• Single Sr Atoms in Optical Tweezer Arrays for Quantum Simulation