Rostock 2019 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 42: Poster: Quantum Optics and Photonics II
Q 42.20: Poster
Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 16:15–18:15, S Atrium Informatik
Collapse and revival in storage of light caused by ultra-long range Rydberg molecules — •Steffen Schmidt-Eberle, Thomas Stolz, Lukas Husel, Stephan Dürr, and Gerhard Rempe — Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, 85748 Garching
Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) with Rydberg states can be used to map the strong interaction between Rydberg atoms to photons. This has recently been used to build a Rydberg-based photon-photon gate [1]. Motivated by the fact that dephasing is a major limitation for the performance of such a gate, we study sources of the dephasing and ways to evade them. We focus on dephasing that occurs in EIT-based storage and retrieval of light and measure the retrieval efficiency as a function of dark time. At a density as low as 5×1010 cm−3, we measure a dephasing time exceeding 20 µ s for principal quantum number 70. To understand the origin of the dephasing, we also study higher densities, where the dephasing is much faster. As in Ref. [2], we observe oscillations in the retrieval efficiency caused by ultra-long range Rydberg dimers. The phenomenon of collapse and revival caused by the formation of trimers, tetramers, etc. is observed at even higher density. The collapse-and-revival data show good contrast, because in our experiment the light hardly samples inhomogeneities of the atomic density.
[1] D. Tiarks et al., Nat.Phys. (2018), doi:10.1038/s41567-018-0313-7
[2] I. Mirgorodskiy et al., Phys. Rev. A 96, 011402 (2017).