Selective Rydberg pumping via strong dipole blockade

Abstract

The resonant dipole-dipole interaction between highly excited Rydberg levels dominates the interaction of neutral atoms at short distances scaling as $1/r^3$. Here we take advantage of the combined effects of strong dipole-dipole interaction and multifrequency driving fields to propose one type of selective Rydberg pumping mechanism. In the computational basis of two atoms $\{|00⟩,|01⟩,|10⟩,|11⟩\}$, this mechanism allows $|11⟩$ to be resonantly pumped upwards to the single-excited Rydberg states while the transitions of the other three states are suppressed. From the perspective of mathematical form, we achieve an analogous Föster resonance for ground states of neutral atoms. The performance of this selective Rydberg pumping is evaluated using the definition of fidelity for controlled-$Z$ gate, which manifests a characteristic of robustness to deviation of interatomic distance, fluctuation of Föster resonance defect, and spontaneous emission of double-excited Rydberg states. As applications of this mechanism, we discuss in detail the preparation of the maximally entangled symmetric state for two atoms via ground-state blockade, and the maximally entangled antisymmetric state via engineered spontaneous emission, within the state-of-the-art experiments, respectively.

11 pages, 13 figures, and comments are welcome