Hannover 2003 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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Q: Quantenoptik

Q 48: Poster: Fallen und Kühlung

Q 48.1: Poster

Donnerstag, 27. März 2003, 16:30–18:30, Lichthof

Towards an ultracold, dense gas of Rydberg atoms — •Simon Fölling, Markus Reetz-Lamour, Kilian Singer, Michaela Tscherneck, and Matthias Weidemüller — MPI für Kernphysik, Heidelberg

In order to detect many-body effects caused by the strong dipole-dipole interactions in dense Rydberg gases such as the dipole blockade [1], it is crucial to reach high spatial densities. Particularly interesting is the regime where the electron wavefunctions of the individual atoms start to overlap.

We present our experimental setup designed to reach high densities by simultaneously compressing and cooling a gas of ⁸⁷Rb-atoms. The compression system is based on a zoomable hollow-beam dark trap using blue-detuned light. For cooling the compressed gas, degenerate Raman sideband cooling is employed [2]. The atoms in the high-density cloud are excited to high Rydberg states using a two-step technique 5S_1/2 → 5P_3/2 → nℓ (n = 30…150, ℓ = s, d) and detected by Field ionization.

The present state of the experiment is presented.

[1] M.D. Lukin et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 037901 (2001)

[2] P. Treutlein et al., Phys. Rev. A 63, 051401R (2001)