Dephasing of ultracold cesium $80D_{5/2}$-Rydberg Electromagnetically Induced Transparency

Abstract

We study Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) of a cascade three-level atom involving 80$D_{5/2}$ state in a strong interaction regime employing a cesium ultracold cloud. In our experiment, a strong coupling laser couples 6$P_{3/2}$ to 80$D_{5/2}$ transition, while a weak probe, driving 6$S_{1/2}$ to 6$P_{3/2}$ transition, probes the coupling induced EIT signal. At the two-photon resonance, we observe that the EIT transmission decreases slowly with time, which is a signature of interaction induced metastability. The dephasing rate ${\gamma }_{\mathrm{OD}}$ is extracted with optical depth OD = ${\gamma }_{\mathrm{OD}}t$. We find that the optical depth linearly increases with time at onset for a fixed probe incident photon number $R_{\mathrm{in}}$ before saturation. The dephasing rate shows a nonlinear dependence on $R_{\mathrm{in}}$. The dephasing mechanism is mainly attributed to the strong dipole-dipole interactions, which leads to state transfer from $n{D}_{5/2}$ to other Rydberg states. We demonstrate that the typical transfer time ${\tau }_{0(80D)}$ obtained by the state selective field ionization technique is comparable with the decay time of EIT transmission ${\tau }_{0(\mathrm{EIT})}$. The presented experiment provides a useful tool for investigating the strong nonlinear optical effects and metastable state in Rydberg many-body systems.

7 pages, 5 figures

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