Related papers: Recent advances in Ultralong-range Rydberg molecul…
Microwave electric field sensing is of importance for a wide range of applications in areas of remote sensing, radar astronomy and communications. Over the past decade, Rydberg atoms, owing to their exaggerated response to microwave…
Rydberg atoms with principal quantum number n >> 1 have exaggerated atomic properties including dipole-dipole interactions that scale as n^4 and radiative lifetimes that scale as n^3. It was proposed a decade ago to take advantage of these…
The lifetimes and decay channels of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules created in a dense BEC are examined by monitoring the time evolution of the Rydberg population using field ionization. Studies of molecules with values of principal…
Rydberg atoms as versatile tools for quantum applications are extremely sensitive to electric fields. When utilizing these atoms, it becomes imperative to comprehensively characterize and mitigate any residual electric fields present in the…
Dense atom ensembles with Rydberg excitations display intriguing collective effects mediated by their strong, long-range dipole-dipole interactions. These collective effects, often modeled using Rydberg superatoms, have gained significant…
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…
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 explore the feasibility of optically forming long-range tetratomic and larger polyatomic molecules in their ground electronic state from ultracold pairs of polar molecules aligned by external fields. Depending on the relative orientation…
The exceptionally large polarisability of highly excited Rydberg atoms (six orders of magnitude higher than ground-state atoms) makes them of great interest in fields such as quantum optics, quantum computing, quantum simulation and…
We develop a self-consistent approach that provides an explicit potential for a Rydberg electron whose ionic core consists of a polarizable medium, typically realized with superfluid droplets. The electron's motion remains separable in…
We show that the highly excited rovibrational spectra of a diatomic molecule and the closely related slow atomic collision processes contain more systematics and require less parameters to characterize than the Rydberg spectrum of an atom.…
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…
We show that the excitation of long-range Rydberg molecules in a three-dimensional optical lattice can be used as a position- and time-sensitive probe of the site occupancy in the system. To this end, we detect the ions which are…
Competing short- and long-range interactions represent distinguished ingredients for the formation of complex quantum many-body phases. Their study is hard to realize with conventional quantum simulators. In this regard, Rydberg atoms…
We report the observation of cold Cs Rydberg atom molecules bound at internuclear separations of R~3-9 um. The bound states result from avoided crossings between Rydberg atom pair interaction potentials in an applied electric field. The…
The resonant dipole-dipole interaction between highly excited Rydberg levels dominates the interaction of neutral atoms at short distances scaling as $1/r^3$. Here we take advantage of the combined effects of strong dipole-dipole…
We observe long-range $^{85}$Rb and $^{87}$Rb (24$D$+5$S_{1/2}$) Rydberg molecules for eight different spin couplings, with binding energies up to 440~MHz and sub-percent relative uncertainty. Isotopic effects of the molecular binding…
The "trilobite" type of molecule, predicted in 2000 and observed experimentally in 2015, arises when a Rydberg electron exerts a weak attractive force on a neutral ground state atom. Such molecules have bond lengths exceeding 100 nm. The…
Recent theoretical studies with alkali atoms A$^{\ast}$ excited to high Rydberg states predicted the existence of ultra long-range molecular bound states. Such excited dimers have large electric dipole moments which, in combination with…
The strong interaction between Rydberg atoms can be used to control the strength and character of the interatomic interaction in ultracold gases by weakly dressing the atoms with a Rydberg state. Elaborate theoretical proposals for the…