Related papers: Ionization of Rydberg atoms embedded in an ultraco…
Ultracold neutral plasmas provide a useful system for studying extreme parameter regimes plasma physics in an accessible laboratory setting. The parameter space of plasma physics can be characterized in part by coupling strength and degree…
Spontaneous avalanche to plasma splits the core of an ellipsoidal Rydberg gas of nitric oxide. Ambipolar expansion first quenches the electron temperature of this core plasma. Then, long-range, resonant charge transfer from ballistic ions…
We review here the studies performed about interactions in an assembly of cold Rydberg atoms. We focus more specially the review on the dipole-dipole interactions and on the effect of the dipole blockade in the laser Rydberg excitation,…
Cold, dense Rydberg gases produced in a cold-atom trap are investigated using spectroscopic methods and time-resolved electron counting. On the discrete Rydberg resonances we observe large trap losses and long lasting electron emission from…
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…
The results of a theoretical investigation of prompt many-body ionization are reported. Our calculations address an experiment that reported ionization in Rydberg gases for densities two orders of magnitude less than expected from…
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 theoretically study trapped ions that are immersed in an ultracold gas of Rydberg-dressed atoms. By off-resonant coupling on a dipole-forbidden transition, the adiabatic atom-ion potential can be made repulsive. We study the energy…
We report clear evidence of the role of dipole-dipole interaction in Penning ionization of Rydberg atoms, leading to the formation of an ultracold plasma. Penning ionization of np Rydberg Cesium atoms is prevented for states with in n < 42,…
We characterize the two-photon excitation of an ultracold gas of Rubidium atoms to Rydberg states analysing the induced atomic losses from an optical dipole trap. Extending the duration of the Rydberg excitation to several ms, the ground…
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 observe a fast Penning ionization in a dilute gas of cold rubidium Rydberg atoms, in the presence of a static electric field of 50 V/cm, with the ionization rate coefficients for two specific states being measured, which are orders of…
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.…
Plasma dynamics critically depends on density and temperature, thus well-controlled experimental realizations are essential benchmarks for theoretical models. The formation of an ultracold plasma can be triggered by ionizing a tunable…
We present a theoretical model of the ionization-recombination balance in the ultracold Rydberg gas-plasma mixture, which is caused by the collective processes rather than by individual interparticle interactions. This should be well…
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…
We investigate the phenomenon of bistability in a thermal gas of cesium atoms excited to Rydberg states. We present both measurements and a numerical model of the phenomena based on collisions. By directly measuring the plasma frequency, we…
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…
We propose to sympathetically slow and cool polar molecules in a cold, low-density beam using laser-cooled Rydberg atoms. The elastic collision cross sections between molecules and Rydberg atoms are large enough to efficiently thermalize…
We have studied the associative ionization of a Rydberg atom and a ground state atom in an ultracold Rydberg gas. The measured scattering cross section is three orders of magnitude larger than the geometrical size of the produced molecule.…