Observation of the Dipole Blockade Effect in Detecting Rydberg Atoms by the Selective Field Ionization Method

Abstract

The dipole blockade effect at laser excitation of mesoscopic ensembles of Rydberg atoms lies in the fact that the excitation of one atom to a Rydberg state blocks the excitation of other atoms due to the shift in the collective energy levels of interacting Rydberg atoms. It is used to obtain the entangled qubit states based on single neutral atoms in optical traps. In this paper, we present our experimental results on the observation of the dipole blockade for mesoscopic ensembles of 1-5 atoms when they are detected by the selective field ionization method. We investigated the spectra of the three-photon laser excitation $5S_{1/2}\to 5P_{3/2}\to 6S_{1/2}\to n{P}_{3/2}$ of cold Rb Rydberg atoms in a magneto-optical trap. We have found that for mesoscopic ensembles this method allows only a partial dipole blockage to be observed. This is most likely related to the presence of parasitic electric fields reducing the interaction energy of Rydberg atoms, the decrease in the probability of detecting high states, and the strong angular dependence of the interaction energy of Rydberg atoms in a single interaction volume.

16 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Evidence for coherent collective Rydberg excitation in the strong blockade regime
• Dipole blockade in a cold Rydberg atomic sample
• Electric-field induced dipole blockade with Rydberg atoms
• Controlling the interactions of a few cold Rb Rydberg atoms by radiofrequency-assisted Förster resonances
• Effect of finite detection efficiency on the observation of the dipole-dipole interaction of a few Rydberg atoms
• Investigation of cold Rb Rydberg atoms in a magneto-optical trap

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Rabi oscillations at three-photon laser excitation of a single rubidium Rydberg atom in an optical dipole trap
• Two-dimensional three-body quadrupole-quadrupole interactions