Rydberg States in Dense Atom Traps

本项目将研究激光冷却铷在全息原子阱（HAT）中的里德伯态的产生和性质。HAT是通过发送高功率连续波YAG激光通过全息相位元件，然后将衍射图案成像到黑暗磁光阱内形成的原子云上而产生的。由此产生的陷阱是一组晶格位置，它们在三维空间中强烈地限制了原子。每个晶格位置包含数千个原子，其密度比磁光阱高出两个数量级以上。类似设计的陷阱是目前Rydberg原子量子计算非常感兴趣的。高密度原子云中里德伯态的窄带激发最近被预测受到“偶极子封锁”碰撞效应的强烈影响，在这种碰撞效应中，单个激发里德伯态的存在可以使相邻原子的频率移出与激发光的共振。HAT将用于研究这一过程，其密度与介观里德伯量子计算所需的密度相当。

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.