Related papers: An experimental approach for investigating many-bo…
Using time-resolved measurements, we demonstrate coherent collective Rydberg excitation crossing over into Rydberg blockade in a dense and ultracold gas trapped at a distance of 100 $\mu$m from a room-temperature atom chip. We perform…
Non-equilibrium quantum dynamics represents an emerging paradigm for condensed matter physics, quantum information science, and statistical mechanics. Strongly interacting Rydberg atoms offer an attractive platform to study…
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 on the observation of interactions between ultracold Rydberg atoms and ions in a Paul trap. The rate of observed inelastic collisions, which manifest themselves as charge transfer between the Rydberg atoms and ions, exceeds that…
Black-body radiation, omnipresent at room temperature, couples nearby Rydberg states. The resulting state mixture features strong dipolar interactions, which may induce dephasing in a Rydberg many-body system. Here we report on a single…
We present and characterize a versatile experimental setup which allows for excitation and detection of Rydberg atoms in quantum gases. The novel concept of the setup features two charged particle detectors and eight electrical field plates…
We demonstrate that through localised Rydberg excitation in a three-dimensional cold atom cloud atomic motion can be rendered directed and nearly confined to a plane, without spatial constraints for the motion of individual atoms. This…
Recent breakthroughs in the experimental manipulation of strongly interacting atomic Rydberg gases in lattice potentials have opened a new avenue for the study of many-body phenomena. Considerable efforts are currently being undertaken to…
A model for the simulation of ensembles of laser-driven Rydberg-Rydberg interacting multi-level atoms is discussed. Our hybrid approach combines an exact two-body treatment of nearby atom pairs with an effective approximate treatment for…
The non-equilibrium dynamics of a gas of cold atoms in which Rydberg states are off-resonantly excited is studied in the presence of noise. The interplay between interaction and off-resonant excitation leads to an initial dynamics where…
A quantum-feedback-based scheme is proposed for generating multipartite entanglements of Rydberg atoms in a dissipative optical cavity. The Rydberg blockade mechanism efficiently prevents double excitations of the system, which is further…
Photonic materials are an emerging platform to explore quantum matter and quantum dynamics. The development of Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency provided a clear route to strong interactions between individual optical…
We explore the fluorescence signals from a pair of atoms driven towards Rydberg states on a three-level ladder transition. The dipole--dipole interactions between Rydberg excited atoms significantly distort the dark state and…
An ensemble of excited atoms can synchronize emission of light collectively in a process known as superradiance when its characteristic size is smaller than the wavelength of emitted photons. The underlying superradiance depends strongly on…
The transition from a few-body system to a many-body system can result in new length scales, novel collective phenomena or even in a phase transition. Such a threshold behavior was shown for example in 4He droplets, where 4He turns into a…
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…
Experiments in dense, ultracold gases of rubidium Rydberg atoms show a considerable decrease of the radiative excited state lifetimes compared to dilute gases. This accelerated decay is explained by collective and cooperative effects,…
We propose a novel experimental method to extend the investigation of ion-atom collisions from the so far studied cold, essentially classical regime to the ultracold, quantum regime. Key aspect of this method is the use of Rydberg molecules…
This review summarizes experimental works performed over the last decade by several groups on the manipulation of a few individual interacting Rydberg atoms. These studies establish arrays of single Rydberg atoms as a promising platform for…
Cold Rydberg atoms subject to long-range dipole-dipole interactions represent a particularly interesting system for exploring few-body interactions and probing the transition from 2-body physics to the many-body regime. In this work we…