Related papers: Imaging the evolution of an ultracold strontium Ry…
We report the spontaneous formation of a plasma from a gas of cold Rydberg molecules. Double-resonant laser excitation promotes nitric oxide, cooled to 1 K in a seeded supersonic molecular beam, to single Rydberg states extending as deep as…
Population dynamics in weakly-excited clouds of ultracold $^{87}$Rb Rydberg atoms were studied by means of trap loss, fluorescence detection, and state dependent stimulated emission. Rydberg atoms were excited to various nl Rydberg states…
The production of very-high-$n$, $n\sim300$-500, strontium Rydberg atoms is explored using a crossed laser-atom beam geometry. $n$$^{1}$S$_{0}$ and $n$$^{1}$D$_{2}$ states are created by two-photon excitation via the 5s5p $^{1}$P$_{1}$…
When ultracold plasma is generated using photonization of laser cooled atoms, some atoms reach only upto Rydberg states. These in turn interact with the free electrons of the plasma and get ionized further. We study the interaction of…
Double-resonant photoexcitation of nitric oxide in a molecular beam creates a dense ensemble of $50f(2)$ Rydberg states, which evolves to form a plasma of free electrons trapped in the potential well of an NO$^+$ spacecharge. The plasma…
Recent experiments have demonstrated the spontaneous evolution of a gas of ultracold Rydberg atoms into an expanding ultracold plasma, as well as the reverse process of plasma recombination into highly excited atomic states. Treating the…
We present the first large-scale simulations of an ultracold, neutral plasma, produced by photoionization of laser-cooled xenon atoms, from creation to initial expansion, using classical molecular dynamics methods with open boundary…
The lifetimes of the lower-lying vibrational states of ultralong-range strontium Rydberg molecules comprising one ground-state 5s2 1S0 atom and one Rydberg atom in the 5s38s 3S1 state are reported. The molecules are created in an ultracold…
We present a study of a cold strontium Rydberg gas. The narrowband laser excitation of Rydberg states in the range n=20-80 from a 6~mK cloud of strontium atoms is detected using the spontaneous ionization of the Rydberg atoms. Using a…
The double-resonant laser excitation of nitric oxide, cooled to 1 K in a seeded supersonic molecular beam, yields a gas of $\approx10^{12}$ molecules cm$^{-3}$ in a single selected Ryberg state. This population evolves to produce prompt…
We report the creation of an interacting cold Rydberg gas of strontium atoms. We show that the excitation spectrum of the inner valence electron is sensitive to the interactions in the Rydberg gas, even though they are mediated by the outer…
We report a systematic experimental and numerical study of the expansion of ultra-cold Rydberg plasmas. Specifically, we have measured the asymptotic expansion velocities, $v_0$, of ultra-cold neutral plasmas (UNPs) which evolve from cold,…
Rydberg alkaline earth atoms are promising tools for quantum simulation and metrology. When one of the two valence electrons is promoted to long-lived circular states, the second valence electron can be optically manipulated without…
Alkaline earth Rydberg atoms are very promising tools for quantum technologies. Their highly excited outer electron provides them with the remarkable properties of Rydberg atoms and, notably, with a huge coupling to external fields or to…
We report the sudden and spontaneous evolution of an initially correlated gas of repulsively interacting Rydberg atoms to an ultracold plasma. Under continuous laser coupling we create a Rydberg ensemble in the strong blockade regime, which…
Ultracold atomic gases have been used extensively in recent years to realize textbook examples of condensed matter phenomena. Recently, phase transitions to ordered structures have been predicted for gases of highly excited, 'frozen'…
We have measured the asymptotic expansion velocities of ultra-cold plasmas (UNPs) which evolve from cold, dense, samples of Rydberg rubidium atoms using ion time-of-flight spectroscopy. From this, we have obtained values for the initial…
This work reports on the real-time detection of internal-state dynamics of cold Rb$^{87}$ atoms being excited to the $30D_{5/2}$ Rydberg state via two-photon excitation. A mesoscopic cloud of atoms is overlapped with the mode volume of a…
We show that transient supersolid quantum states of Rydberg-excitations can be created dynamically from a Mott insulator of ground state atoms in a 2D optical-lattices by irradiating it with short laser pulses. The structure of these…
We have experimentally demonstrated both heating and cooling of electrons in an ultracold neutral plasma (UNP) by embedding Rydberg atoms into the plasma soon after its creation. We have determined the relationship between the initial…