Related papers: Electro-optic control of atom-light interactions u…
Resonant electric dipole-dipole interactions between cold Rydberg atoms were observed using microwave spectroscopy. Laser-cooled Rb atoms in a magneto-optical trap were optically excited to 45d Rydberg states using a pulsed laser. A…
Laser cooled Rb atoms were optically excited to 46d Rydberg states. A microwave pulse transferred a fraction of the atoms to the 47p Rydberg state. The resonant electric dipole-dipole interactions between atoms in these two states were…
Interfacing light and matter at the quantum level is at the heart of modern atomic and optical physics and enables new quantum technologies involving the manipulation of single photons and atoms. A prototypical atom-light interface is…
We investigate the interaction of weak light fields with two-dimensional lattices of atoms, in which two-photon coupling establishes conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency and excites high lying atomic Rydberg states. This…
Optically trapped Rydberg atoms are a suitable platform to explore quantum many-body physics mediated by long-range atom--atom interactions that can be engineered through externally applied light fields. However, this approach is limited to…
We report on the local control of the transition frequency of a spin-$1/2$ encoded in two Rydberg levels of an individual atom by applying a state-selective light shift using an addressing beam. With this tool, we first study the spectrum…
We show that very large nonlocal nonlinear interactions between pairs of colliding slow-light pulses can be realized in atomic vapors in the regime of electromagnetically induced transparency. These nonlinearities are mediated by strong,…
Rydberg excitons (analogues of Rydberg atoms in condensed matter systems) are highly excited bound electron-hole states with large Bohr radii. The interaction between them as well as exciton coupling to light may lead to strong optical…
A three-level atomic medium can be made transparent to a resonant probe field in the presence of a strong control field acting on an adjacent atomic transition to a long-lived state, which can be represented by a highly excited Rydberg…
Coupling photons to Rydberg excitations in a cold atomic gas yields unprecedentedly large optical nonlinearities at the level of individual light quanta, where the formation of nearby dark-state polaritons is blocked by the strong…
By coupling a probe transition to a Rydberg state using electro-magnetically induced transparency (EIT) we map the strong dipole-dipole interactions onto an optical field. We characterize the resulting cooperative optical non-linearity as a…
The interaction between Rydberg states of neutral atoms is strong and long-range, making it appealing to put it to use in the context of quantum technologies. Recently, first applications of this idea have been reported in the fields of…
We develop an approach to generate finite-range atomic interactions via optical Rydberg-state excitation and study the underlying excitation dynamics in theory and experiment. In contrast to previous work, the proposed scheme is based on…
We present a method to control collisions between ultracold neutral atoms in the electronic ground state and trapped ions. During the collision, the neutral atom is resonantly excited by a laser to a low-field-seeking Rydberg state, which…
The long-range interaction between Rydberg-excited atoms endows a medium with large optical nonlinearity. Here, we demonstrate an optical switch to operate on a single photon from an entangled photon pair under a Rydberg electromagnetically…
We propose a novel scheme for coupling a Rydberg state to a stationary light polariton, based on a dual-V level scheme. We investigate the properties of the resulting stationary Rydberg polariton, and show that its form and its quadratic…
We propose a novel scheme to efficiently tune the scattering length of two colliding ground-state atoms by off-resonantly coupling the scattering-state to an excited Rydberg-molecular state using laser light. For the s-wave scattering of…
We develop and demonstrate a spectroscopic method for Rydberg-Rydberg transitions using a phase-controlled and -modulated, standing-wave laser field focused on a cloud of cold $^{85}$Rb Rydberg atoms. The method is based on the…
Divalent atoms provide excellent means for advancing control in Rydberg atom-based quantum simulation and computing, due to the second optically active valence electron available. Particularly promising in this context are circular Rydberg…
Electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) with Rydberg atoms enables strong interactions between atoms to be controlled and measured by pulses of light. Consequently, Rydberg dark polaritons are a promising platform for quantum…