Related papers: Microscopic electronic structure tomography of Ryd…
Controlling molecular binding at the level of single atoms is one of the holy grails of quantum chemistry. Rydberg macrodimers -- bound states between highly excited Rydberg atoms -- provide a novel perspective in this direction. Resulting…
A microscopic understanding of molecules is essential for many fields of natural sciences but their tiny size hinders direct optical access to their constituents. Rydberg macrodimers - bound states of two highly-excited Rydberg atoms -…
Long-range metastable molecules consisting of two cesium atoms in high Rydberg states have been observed in an ultracold gas. A sequential three-photon two-color photoassociation scheme was employed to form these molecules in states which…
The coupling of an isolated quantum state to a continuum is typically associated with decoherence and decreased lifetime. Here, we demonstrate that Rydberg macrodimers, weakly bound pairs of Rydberg atoms, can overcome this dissipative…
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 propose an approach to detect individual Rydberg molecules with each molecule consisting of two atoms in different Rydberg states. The scheme exploits the movement of atoms in the presence of an external force that exerts only on atoms…
Sufficiently high densities in Bose-Einstein condensates provide favorable conditions for the production of ultralong-range polyatomic molecules consisting of one Rydberg atom and a number of neutral ground state atoms. The chemical binding…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking and formation of self-organized structures in nonlinear systems are intriguing and important phenomena in nature. Advancing such research to new nonlinear optical regimes is of much interest for both…
Photoionization of atoms immersed in an environment such as an ultracold gas is investigated. We show that the interference of two ionization pathways, one passing directly to the continuum and one accounting for scattering processes…
Ultracold systems offer an unprecedented level of control of interactions between atoms. An important challenge is to achieve a similar level of control of the interactions between photons. Towards this goal, we propose a realization of a…
Photonic state engineering in waveguide QED is typically based on local light-matter interactions. This limits its control over the spatial structure of bound photonic states. Here, we demonstrate a distinct mechanism arising from the…
Strong interactions can amplify quantum effects such that they become important on macroscopic scales. Controlling these coherently on a single particle level is essential for the tailored preparation of strongly correlated quantum systems…
Controlling strongly interacting many-body systems enables the creation of tailored quantum matter, with properties transcending those based solely on single particle physics. Atomic ensembles which are optically driven to a Rydberg state…
X-ray as well as electron diffraction are powerful tools for structure determination of molecules. Studies on randomly oriented molecules in the gas-phase address cases in which molecular crystals cannot be generated or the interaction-free…
We explore the external electric field control of a species of ultralong-range molecules that emerge from the interaction of a ground state polar molecule with a Rydberg atom. The external field mixes the Rydberg electronic states and…
Ultrafast electron diffraction and time-resolved serial crystallography are the basis of the ongoing revolution in capturing at the atomic level of detail the structural dynamics of molecules. However, most experiments employ the classical…
Electromagnetic fields with complex spatial variation routinely arise in Nature. We study the response of a small molecule to monochromatic fields of arbitrary three-dimensional geometry. First, we consider the allowed configurations of the…
We examine topological phases and symmetry-protected electronic edge states in the context of a Rydberg composite: a Rydberg atom interfaced with a structured arrangement of ground-state atoms. The electronic Hamiltonian of such a composite…
We report on the selective addressing of an individual atom in a pair of single-atom microtraps separated by $3\;\mu$m. Using a tunable light-shift, we render the selected atom off-resonant with a global Rydberg excitation laser which is…
The ability to control and tune interactions in ultracold atomic gases has paved the way towards the realization of new phases of matter. Whereas experiments have so far achieved a high degree of control over short-ranged interactions, the…