High Resolution Rydberg Spectroscopy of ultracold Rubidium Atoms

Abstract

We present experiments on two-photon excitation of ${}^{87}$Rb atoms to Rydberg states. For this purpose, two continuous-wave (cw)-laser systems for both 780 nm and 480 nm have been set up. These systems are optimized to a small linewidth (well below 1 MHz) to get both an efficient excitation process and good spectroscopic resolution. To test the performance of our laser system, we investigated the Stark splitting of Rydberg states. For n=40 we were able to see the hyperfine levels splitting in the electrical field for different finestructure states. To show the ability of spatially selective excitation to Rydberg states, we excited rubidium atoms in an electrical field gradient and investigated both linewidths and lineshifts. Furthermore we were able to excite the atoms selectively from the two hyperfine ground states to Rydberg states. Finally, we investigated the Autler-Townes splitting of the 5S${}_{1/2}$$\to$5P${}_{3/2}$ transition via a Rydberg state to determine the Rabi frequency of this excitation step.

9 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Dipole Blockade and Quantum Information Processing in Mesoscopic Atomic Ensembles
• Fast quantum gates for neutral atoms
• Local Blockade of Rydberg Excitation in an Ultracold Gas
• Suppression of Excitation and Spectral Broadening Induced by Interactions in a Cold Gas of Rydberg Atoms
• Spectroscopic observation of resonant electric dipole-dipole interactions between cold Rydberg atoms
• Applications of Integrated Magnetic Microtraps
• Autler-Townes spectroscopy of the $5S_{1/2}-5P_{3/2}-44D$ cascade of cold ${}^{85}$Rb atoms
• A lattice of Magneto-Optical and Magnetic traps for cold atoms

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Quantum information with Rydberg atoms
• Coherent optical detection of highly excited Rydberg states using electromagnetically induced transparency
• Evidence for coherent collective Rydberg excitation in the strong blockade regime
• Electromagnetically induced transparency of an interacting cold Rydberg ensemble
• Energy-dependent effective interactions for dilute many-body systems
• Optical transfer cavity stabilization using current-modulated injection-locked diode lasers
• Measurement and numerical calculation of Rubidium Rydberg Stark spectra
• Measurement of the 5D Level Polarizabilty in Laser Cooled Rb atoms