Darmstadt 2008 – scientific programme

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 26: Posters: BECs, ultracold gases and plasmas

A 26.20: Poster

Thursday, March 13, 2008, 16:30–18:30, Poster C3

Excitation of Rydberg atoms in a Bose Einstein Condensate — •Cenap Ates and Jan-Michael Rost — Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, Nöthnitzer Str. 38, 01187 Dresden

In an ultracold but non-degenerate gas the dynamics of interacting Rydberg atoms is strongly influenced by the properties (density, spatial structure) of the ground state environment. The macroscopic phase coherence present in a quantum degenerate gas like a BEC, allows for the opposite scenario, i.e. an effect of the Rydberg excitations on the dynamics of the ground state system, due to an additional phase imprinted by the Rydberg impurites onto the condensate wavefunction.

We study the excitation dynamics of the Rydberg atoms and the subsequent time evolution of the BEC by setting up a hierarchy of density matrix equations for the coupled BEC-Rydberg system and treating them self-consistently up to the level of pair correlations of the Rydberg atoms.