Rydberg States in Dense Atom Traps

本项目将研究在全息原子陷阱(HAT)中激光冷却的Rydberg态的产生和性质。这种帽子是通过全息位相元件发射高功率连续波YAG激光，然后将衍射图案成像到黑暗磁光陷阱内形成的原子云上产生的。由此产生的陷阱是一系列晶格位置，它在三维空间强烈地限制了原子。每个晶格点包含数以千计的原子，其密度比磁光陷阱中的原子高两个数量级以上。类似设计的陷阱目前对里德堡原子量子计算非常感兴趣。最近，人们预测高密度原子云中里德堡态的窄带激发将受到“偶极阻挡”碰撞效应的强烈影响，在这种碰撞效应中，单个激发里德堡态的存在会使邻近原子与激发光的共振频移。HAT将被用来研究这一过程，其密度与介观里德堡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.