Related papers: Rydberg molecules bound by strong light fields

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…

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…

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…

We propose a hybrid optomechanical quantum system consisting of a moving membrane strongly coupled to an ensemble of N atoms with a Rydberg state. Due to the strong van-der-Waals interaction between the atoms, the ensemble forms an…

Rydberg atoms in optical lattices and tweezers is now a well established platform for simulating quantum spin systems. However, the role of the atoms' spatial wavefunction has not been examined in detail experimentally. Here, we show a…

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…

Strongly Rydberg-blockaded two-level atoms form a Rydberg superatom, which is excited only to a collective symmetrical Dicke state. However, emerging often in the alkali-earth atoms, the spontaneous decay from the Rydberg state to an…

We propose a scheme for rapid generation of high fidelity steady state entanglement between a pair of atoms. A two-photon excitation process towards long-lived Rydberg states with finite pairwise interaction, a dark state interference…

The interaction of a single photon with an individual two-level system is the textbook example of quantum electrodynamics. Achieving strong coupling in this system so far required confinement of the light field inside resonators or…

Quantum optics based on highly excited atoms, also known as Rydberg atoms, has cemented itself as a powerful platform for the manipulation of light at the few-photon level. The Rydberg blockade, resulting from the strong interaction between…

Stability achieved by large angular momentum is ubiquitous in nature, with examples ranging from classical mechanics, over optics and chemistry, to nuclear physics. In atoms, angular momentum can protect excited electronic orbitals from…

We describe the coupling of moving atoms to a one dimensional photonic waveguide in the regime where the atomic velocities are comparable to the effective speed of light. Such conditions could be achieved, for example, in photonic crystals…

A fascinating aspect of Rydberg atoms is their ability to form huge but very weakly bound molecules with a ground state atom, only held together by a scattering process between the latter and the Rydberg electron. Beyond the usual way of…

We propose a Rydberg molecule dressing scheme to create strong and long-ranged interactions at selective distances. This is achieved through laser coupling ground-state atoms off-resonantly to an attractive molecular curve of two…

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 -…

When atoms are excited to high-lying Rydberg states they interact strongly with dipolar forces. The resulting state-dependent level shifts allow to study many-body systems displaying intriguing nonequilibrium phenomena, such as constrained…

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…

We show that two photons coupled to Rydberg states via electromagnetically induced transparency can interact via an effective Coulomb potential. This interaction gives rise to a continuum of two-body bound states. Within the continuum,…

Rydberg atoms excited by cold blackbody radiation are shown to display long-lived quantum coherences on timescales of tens of picoseconds. By solving non-Markovian equations of motion with no free parameters we obtain the time evolution of…

Bound states of massive particles, such as nuclei, atoms or molecules, constitute the bulk of the visible world around us. In contrast, photons typically only interact weakly. We report the observation of traveling three-photon bound states…