Related papers: Ionization of Rydberg atoms embedded in an ultraco…
Within a dense environment ($\rho \approx 10^{14}\,$atoms/cm$^3$) at ultracold temperatures ($T < 1\,\mu{}\text{K}$), a single atom excited to a Rydberg state acts as a reaction center for surrounding neutral atoms. At these temperatures…
Ultracold neutral plasmas, formed by photoionizing laser-cooled atoms near the ionization threshold, have electron temperatures in the 1-1000 kelvin range and ion temperatures from tens of millikelvin to a few kelvin. They represent a new…
We report on the realization of high resolution electron microscopy of Rydberg-excited ultracold atomic samples. The implementation of an ultraviolet laser system allows us to excite the atom, with a single-photon transition, to Rydberg…
We investigate a possible mechanism for the autoionization of ultracold Rydberg gases, based on the resonant coupling of Rydberg pair states to the ionization continuum. Unlike an atomic collision where the wave functions begin to overlap,…
Collisional and thermal ionization of sodium nS and nD Rydberg atoms with n=8-20 has been studied. The experiments were performed using a two-step pulsed laser excitation in an effusive atomic beam at atom density of about 2 10^{10}…
We have studied an ionization of alkali-metal Rydberg atoms by blackbody radiation (BBR). The results of the theoretical calculations of ionization rates of Li, Na, K, Rb and Cs Rydberg atoms are presented. Calculations have been performed…
Cold atomic gases resonantly excited to Rydberg states can exhibit strong optical nonlinearity at the single photon level. We observe that in such samples radiation trapping leads to an additional mechanism for Rydberg excitation.…
We present a theory of electromagnetically induced transparency in a cold ensemble of strongly interacting Rydberg atoms. Long-range interactions between the atoms constrain the medium to behave as a collection of superatoms, each…
We propose a scheme to directly laser cool Rydberg atoms by laser cooling the residual ion core within the Rydberg-electron orbit. The scheme is detailed for alkaline-earth-metal Rydberg atoms, whose ions can be easily laser cooled. We…
The formation of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules is a result of the attractive interaction between Rydberg electron and polarizable ground state atom in an ultracold gas. In the nondegenerate case the backaction of the polarizable atom on…
Three-body recombination, an important collisional process in plasmas, increases dramatically at low electron temperatures, with an accepted scaling of T_e^-9/2. We measure three-body recombination in an ultracold neutral xenon plasma by…
In the article an ultracold electron-ion plasma created by photoionization of cooled atoms is investigated. We obtained analitical expressions for non-ideality parameters which establish due to correlation heating. In the work the nearest…
We study the long-range interaction of a single ion with a highly excited ultracold Rydberg atom and report on the direct observation of ion-induced Rydberg excitation blockade mediated over tens of micrometer distances. Our hybrid ion-atom…
We theoretically investigate the quantum properties of nS, nP, and nD Rydberg atoms in a magnetic Ioffe-Pritchard trap. In particular, it is demonstrated that the two-body character of Rydberg atoms significantly alters the trapping…
We propose a new approach to excite ion-pair states of ultracold dimers. The central idea is a two-step process where first long-range Rydberg molecules are formed by photoassociation, which are then driven by stimulated emission towards…
We propose a method to sympathetically cool polar molecules with Rydberg atoms without destroying the quantum information encoded in the polar molecules. While the interactions between the two are usually state-dependent, we show how to…
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…
We report measurements of the ion velocity distribution in an ultracold neutral plasma derived from a dense, cold Rydberg gas in a MOT. The Rydberg atoms are excited using a resonant two-step excitation pathway with lasers of 4 ns duration.…
The internal electric field of a Rydberg atom electron can bind a polar molecule to form a giant ultralong-range stable polyatomic molecule. Such molecules not only share their properties with Rydberg atoms, they possess huge permanent…
Electron and ion energization (i.e., heating and nonthermal acceleration) is a fundamental, but poorly understood, outcome of plasma turbulence. In this work, we present new results on this topic from particle-in-cell simulations of driven…