Controlling ultracold Rydberg atoms in the quantum regime

Abstract

We discuss the properties of Rydberg atoms in a magnetic Ioffe-Pritchard trap being commonly used in ultracold atomic physics experiments. The Hamiltonian is derived and it is demonstrated how tight traps alter the coupling of the atom to the magnetic field. We solve the underlying Schroedinger equation of the system within a given n-manifold and show that for a sufficiently large Ioffe field strength the 2n^2-dimensional system of coupled Schroedinger equations decays into several decoupled multicomponent equations governing the center of mass motion. An analysis of the fully quantized center of mass and electronic states is undertaken. In particular, we discuss the situation of tight center of mass confinement outlining the procedure to generate a low-dimensional ultracold Rydberg gas.

References in corpus (1)

• Spectral Properties and Lifetimes of Neutral Spin-1/2-Fermions in a Magnetic Guide

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Trapped Rydberg Ions: From Spin Chains to Fast Quantum Gates
• One-dimensional Rydberg Gas in a Magnetoelectric Trap
• Magnetic trapping of ultracold Rydberg atoms in low angular momentum states
• Ultracold Rydberg Atoms in a Ioffe-Pritchard Trap
• Exploiting the composite character of Rydberg atoms for cold atom trapping
• Spectral properties of a Rydberg atom immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate