Stuttgart 2012 – scientific programme
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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik
MO 7: SYRA: Ultracold Rydberg Atoms and Molecules 1
MO 7.4: Talk
Tuesday, March 13, 2012, 11:45–12:00, V47.01
Electromagnetically Induced Transparency in Strongly Interacting Rydberg Gases — •Johannes Otterbach1, David Petrosyan2,3, Alexey V. Gorshkov4, Thomas Pohl5, Mikhail D. Lukin1, and Michael Fleischhauer2 — 1Physics Department, Harvard University — 2Fachbereich Physik, TU Kaiserslautern — 3Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, FORTH, Crete — 4Institute for Quantum Information, California Institute of Technology — 5Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden
The recent advance in coherently controlling and manipulating strong, long-range Rydberg interactions has triggered various studies of the Rydberg blockade effect for applications in quantum information processing and crystal formation. In this talk I show that Rydberg interactions can be used to alter the photon statistics of a weak probe field after propagating in a coherently prepared atomic Rydberg gas under conditions of Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (EIT). The Rydberg blockade mechanism leads to an effective two-level physics when two photons are separated less than the blockade radius resulting in a strong anti-correlation of two photons separated by an avoided volume. I argue that the formation of such hard-sphere photons is a key-ingredient in the explanation ofthe recent experiment of Pritchard et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 193603 (2010)]. Finally the observation of such correlation in future experiments will be discussed.