2016/05/31 by Michael Schlagmüller, Tara Cubel Liebisch, Felix Engel +10 · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Atom (system on chip) #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Dust and Plasma Wave Phenomena #Excited state #Kinetic energy #Quantum chaos and dynamical systems #Rydberg atom #Rydberg constant #Rydberg formula #Rydberg matter #Rydberg state #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevx.6.031020
published as Phys. Rev. X 6, 031020 (2016) · 13 pages, 13 figures
openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex publication_date 2016/08/10 · arxiv created 2016/09/12 · arxiv updated 2016/09/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Within a dense environment ( 10 14 atoms=cm 3 ) at ultracold temperatures (T < 1 K), a single atom excited to a Rydberg state acts as a reaction center for surrounding neutral atoms. At these temperatures, almost all neutral atoms within the Rydberg orbit are bound to the Rydberg core and interact with the Rydberg atom. We have studied the reaction rate and products for nS 87 Rb Rydberg states, and we mainly observe a state change of the Rydberg electron to a high orbital angular momentum l, with the released energy being converted into kinetic energy of the Rydberg atom. Unexpectedly, the measurements show a threshold behavior at n 100 for the inelastic collision time leading to increased lifetimes of the Rydberg state independent of the densities investigated. Even at very high densities ( 4.8 10 14 cm -3 ), the lifetime of a Rydberg atom exceeds 10 s at n > 140 compared to 1 s at n 90. In addition, a second observed reaction mechanism, namely, Rb 2 molecule formation, was studied. Both reaction products are equally probable for n 40, but the fraction of Rb 2 created drops to below 10% for n 90.