Rydberg ions in coherent motional states: A new method for determining the polarizability of Rydberg ions

Abstract

We present a method for measuring the polarizability of Rydberg ions confined in the harmonic potential of a Paul trap. For a highly excited electronic state, the coupling between the electronic wave function and the trapping field modifies the excitation probability depending on the motional state of the ion. This interaction strongly depends on the polarizability of the excited state and manifests itself in the state-dependent secular frequencies of the ion. We initialize a single trapped ${}^{40}$Ca${}^{+}$ ion from the motional ground state into coherent states with $|\alpha |$ up to 12 using electric voltages on the trap segments. The internal state, firstly initialised in the long-lived 3D${}_{5/2}$ state, is excited to a Rydberg S${}_{1/2}$-state via the 5P${}_{3/2}$ state in a two-photon process. We probe the depletion of the 3D${}_{5/2}$ state owing to the Rydberg excitation followed by a decay into the internal ground 4S${}_{1/2}$ state. By analysing the obtained spectra we extract the polarizability of Rydberg states which agree with numerical calculations. The method is easy-to-implement and applicable to different Rydberg states regardless of their principal or angular quantum numbers. An accurate value of the state polarizability is needed for quantum gate operations with Rydberg ion crystals.

16 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator
• An ${}^{27}$Al${}^{+}$ quantum-logic clock with systematic uncertainty below $10^{-18}$
• Millimeter Wave Detection via Autler-Townes Splitting in Rubidium Rydberg Atoms
• Strongly correlated growth of Rydberg aggregates in a vapor cell
• Trapped Rydberg Ions: From Spin Chains to Fast Quantum Gates
• Magic trapping of a Rydberg ion with a diminished static polarizability

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Trapped atoms in spatially-structured vector light fields
• Spin Phonon Relaxation Dynamics from a Conical Intersection of Trapped Rydberg Ions
• Quantum computing architecture with Rydberg gates in trapped ions