Real-time detection of Rydberg state dynamics of cold atoms using an optical cavity

Abstract

This work reports on the real-time detection of internal-state dynamics of cold Rb${}^{87}$ atoms being excited to the $30D_{5/2}$ Rydberg state via two-photon excitation. A mesoscopic cloud of atoms is overlapped with the mode volume of a confocal optical cavity and optically pumped by two laser beams transverse to the cavity axis. The excitation to Rydberg states changes the collective atom-cavity coupling, which is detected by monitoring the light transmitted through the cavity while being weakly driven. In addition to the damped coherent excitation dynamics and the decay back to the ground state, the data show a superradiant enhancement of the black-body radiation induced transitions from the $30D_{5/2}$ state to neighboring Rydberg states. Furthermore, they show a density dependent mitigation of the superradiant decay which is attributed to long range dipole-dipole interactions between atoms in the involved Rydberg states. These results contribute to solving a recent controversy on the interplay between BBR-induced superradiance and Rydberg atom interactions.

9 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Strong atom-field coupling for Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical cavity on a chip
• Single Photon Transistor Mediated by Inter-State Rydberg Interaction
• Dynamical crystallization in a low-dimensional Rydberg gas
• Single-Photon Transistor Using a Förster Resonance
• Electromagnetically induced transparency of an interacting cold Rydberg ensemble
• Dynamics of Low-Density Ultracold Rydberg Gases
• Ionization of Sodium and Rubidium nS, nP and nD Rydberg atoms by blackbody radiation
• Intracavity Rydberg atom electromagnetically induced transparency using a high finesse optical cavity

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Interactions mediated by atoms, photons, electrons, and excitons
• High finesse bow-tie cavity for strong atom-photon coupling in Rydberg arrays
• Quantum Optics with Rydberg Superatoms
• Collective atom-cavity coupling and non-linear dynamics with atoms with multilevel ground states
• Ground state bistability of cold atoms in a cavity
• Many-body radiative decay in strongly interacting Rydberg ensembles
• Avalanche terahertz photon detection in a Rydberg tweezer array
• Superradiance-induced multistability in driven Rydberg lattice gases
• Decoherence and the ultraviolet cutoff: non-Markovian dynamics of a charged particle in a magnetic field
• Transient dynamics of subradiance and superradiance in open optical ensembles
• Dissipative phase transition: from qubits to qudits
• Observation of electric field induced superradiance slowdown in ultracold Rydberg atomic gases