Stuttgart 2012 – scientific programme

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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 15: SYRA: Ultracold Rydberg Atoms and Molecules 3

MO 15.2: Talk

Thursday, March 15, 2012, 10:45–11:00, V7.03

Rydberg Atom Spectroscopy in Electric Fields — •Atreju Tauschinsky, Richard Newell, Vanessa Leung, Ben van Linden van den Heuvell, and Robert Spreeuw — Institute of Physics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

We study rubidium Rydberg states in static and oscillating electric fields using Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (EIT) in the 5s-5p-nℓ system for n ≥ 28 and ℓ=0…2. We present high-precision Doppler free measurements of DC Stark shifts in a room temperature vapour cell which are in excellent agreement with theoretical calculations. These measurements clearly show that the assumption of quadratically shifting energy levels where the shift is determined by the polarizability of the state is valid only for very small fields, less than 5% of the Inglis-Teller Limit.

We furthermore investigate the behaviour of Rydberg states in superposed AC and DC electric fields and observe populated sidebands of very high order. We present a model, based on generalized Bessel functions for the sideband population induced by oscillating fields in arbitrarily stark-shifting levels and compare the results of this model to our measurements.

Atreju Tauschinsky et al. Spatially resolved excitation of Rydberg atoms and surface effects on an atom chip. Phys. Rev. A 81, 063411 (2010)

C. S. E. van Ditzhuizen et al. Observation of Stückelberg oscillations in dipole-dipole interactions. Phys. Rev. A 80, 063407 (2009)