Related papers: Arrested relaxation in an isolated molecular ultra…
Penning ionization releases electrons in a state-selected Rydberg gas of nitric oxide entrained in a supersonic molecular beam. Subsequent processes of electron impact avalanche, bifurcation, and quench form a strongly coupled, spatially…
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…
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…
Prethermalization occurs as an important phase in the dynamics of many-body systems when strong coupling drives a quasi-equilibrium in a subspace separated from the thermodynamic equilibrium by the restriction of a gap in energy or other…
Out-of-equilibrium, strong correlation in a many-body system triggers emergent properties that can act in important ways to constrain the natural dissipation of energy and matter. Networks of atoms, intricately engineered to arrange…
Ultracold plasmas are a promising candidate for the creation of strongly-coupled Coulomb systems. Unfortunately, the values of the coupling parameter Gamma_e actually achieved after photoionization of the neutral atoms remain relatively…
An ellipsoidal volume of Rydberg molecules, entrained in a supersonic molecular beam, evolves on a nanosecond timescale to form a strongly coupled ultracold plasma. We present coupled rate-equation simulations that model the underlying…
Not long after metastable xenon was photoionized in a magneto-optical trap, groups in Europe and North America found that similar states of ionized gas evolved spontaneously from state-selected, high principal quantum number Rydberg gases.…
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…
Resonant mm-wave fields drive $n_0f(2) \rightarrow (n_0 \pm 1)g(2)$ transitions in a state-selected $n_0f(2)$ Rydberg gas of NO. This transformation produces a clear signature in the selected field ionization spectrum and dramatically…
We have studied the behavior of cold Rydberg atoms embedded in an ultracold plasma. We demonstrate that even deeply bound Rydberg atoms are completely ionized in such an environment, due to electron collisions. Using a fast pulse extraction…
We argue that the quenched ultracold plasma presents an experimental platform for studying quantum many-body physics of disordered systems in the long-time and finite energy-density limits. We consider an experiment that quenches a 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…
Understanding Coulomb driven many-body dynamics in ultracold atomic systems far from equilibrium remains an open challenge, particularly when ultrafast excitation channels create competing pathways toward Rydberg gases or ultracold plasmas.…
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…
We report on the self-induced electron trapping occurring in a ultracold neutral plasma that is set to expand freely. At the early stages of the plasma, the ions are not thermalized follow a Gaussian spatial profile, providing the trapping…
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…
We describe a hybrid molecular dynamics approach for the description of ultracold neutral plasmas, based on an adiabatic treatment of the electron gas and a full molecular dynamics simulation of the ions, which allows us to follow the…
We propose a cooling scheme to prepare stationary entanglement of neutral atoms in the Rydberg blockade regime by combination of periodically collective laser pumping and dissipation. In each cycle, the controlled unitary dynamics process…
We perform a comprehensive investigation of the coupling between a Rydberg-dressed atomic gas and an ultra-cold plasma. Using simultaneous time-resolved measurements of both neutral atoms and ions, we show that plasma formation occurs via a…