Hannover 2013 – scientific programme

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 12: Ultracold plasmas and Rydberg atoms (with Q)

A 12.7: Talk

Monday, March 18, 2013, 18:15–18:30, E 415

Rydberg Physics on the Millisecond Timescale — •Thomas Niederprüm, Tobias Massimo Weber, Torsten Manthey, Vera Guarrera, Giovanni Barontini, and Herwig Ott — Research Center Optimas, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany

Several proposals have demonstrated that dressing ultracold atoms with highly excited Rydberg states can be an extremely powerful tool to tune the interactions among them. The changed interactions create a new equilibrium state for the system that is reached typically on a timescale of milliseconds. While the short time behavior of cold Rydberg gases, the so called frozen Rydberg gas, has been vastly studied in the past only little work has been done to understand the long time behavior of Rydberg excitations in cold atomic gases. This talk will give an overview on recent experiments in our group aiming to address this regime of Rydberg physics. The ionization of Rydberg atoms inside cold clouds turns out to be an important process in such experiments. Monitoring these ion signals and combining the Rydberg excitation with a Scanning Electron Microscope we are able to study blockade phenomena in samples with dimensions down to 500 nm inside of optical lattices. Furthermore the influence of high energetic electrons on the excitation of Rydberg atoms inside a BEC is reported.