Rydberg States in Dense Atom Traps

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This project will study the production and properties of Rydberg states of laser-cooled rubidium inside a holographic atom trap (HAT). The HAT is produced by sending a high power continuous-wave YAG laser though a holographic phase element, then imaging the diffraction pattern onto a cloud of atoms formed inside a dark magneto-optical trap. The resulting trap is an array of lattice sites that strongly confines atoms in three dimensions. Each lattice site contains thousands of atoms at densities more than two orders of magnitude higher than in a magneto-optical trap. Traps of similar design are of great current interest for Rydberg atom quantum computation. Narrow-band excitation of Rydberg states in high density atom clouds has been recently predicted to be strongly affected by the "dipole-blockade "collisional effect in which the presence of a single excited Rydberg state can frequency shift neighboring atoms out of resonance with the excitation light. The HAT will be used to study this process at densities comparable to those needed for mesoscopic Rydberg quantum computation.