Stuttgart 2012 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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A: Fachverband Atomphysik
A 41: Poster: Ultra-cold plasmas and Rydberg systems
A 41.2: Poster
Donnerstag, 15. März 2012, 16:30–19:00, Poster.V
A new setup for experiments with ultracold Rydberg atoms — •Johannes Deiglmayr, Heiner Sassmannshausen, and Frederic Merkt — LPC, ETH Zuerich, Switzerland
The study of dense samples of ultracold atoms in high Rydberg states has yielded many spectacular results in recent years, such as the observation of exotic dimers with bond-lengths exceeding 1 µm or the realization of quantum gates based on neutral atoms [1].
Here we present a new setup for high resolution spectroscopy of atomic Rydberg states. Laser-cooled cesium atoms are excited from the 6S1/2 state to Rydberg states by a UV photon from a pulsed laser. A phase-locked narrowband source of continuous millimeter waves (linewidth <10 kHz) is then used to determine Rydberg-Rydberg transition energies with highest accuracy. First measurements characterizing the performance of our setup are shown.
We also envision the combination of this setup with a chip-based Rydberg decelerator recently developed in our group [2]. Prospects for energy-controlled collisions between Rydberg and ground state atoms are discussed and a new scheme for a single-atom on demand source is presented.
[1] Bendkowsky et al., Nature 458 (2009); Isenhower et al., PRL 104 (2010); Wilk et al., ibid [2] SD Hogan et al., accepted for publication in PRL