Stuttgart 2012 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 71: Ultra-cold plasmas and Rydberg systems

Q 71.6: Talk

Friday, March 16, 2012, 15:15–15:30, V57.03

A fat Schrödinger's cat of Rydberg dressed atomic clouds — Sebastian Möbius, Michael Genkin, Alexander Eisfeld, •Sebastian Wüster, and Jan-Michael Rost — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Strasse 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany

We propose Schrödinger's cat-states of hundreds of atoms, in a spatial superposition of locations micrometers apart, which would come closer to the original than even the impressive recent experimental progress, e.g. [1].

In Rydberg dressed ultra-cold gases, ground state atoms inherit properties of the admixed Rydberg state, such as long-range hyperfine state-dependent interactions [2-4]. We present an idea, how a pair of atomic clouds can evolve into a spatial Schrödinger's cat state under the influence of these interactions. The two clouds, containing about 50-100 atoms each, are then in a coherent superposition of two discrete locations, separated by micrometers. The same interactions responsible for this spatial state, can also be exploited to create the initially required entanglement in hyperfine space.

[1] S. Gerlich et al., Nature Comm. 2, 263 (2011).

[2] L. Santos, G. V. Shlyapnikov, P. Zoller, and M. Lewenstein, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 1791 (2000).

[3] M. Müller, L. Liang, I. Lesanovsky, and P. Zoller, New J. Phys. 10, 093009 (2008).

[4] S. Wüster, C. Ates, A. Eisfeld, and J. Rost, New J. Phys. 13, 073044 (2011).