Conical Intersections in an Ultracold Gas

Abstract

We find that energy surfaces of more than two atoms or molecules interacting via transition dipole-dipole potentials generically possess conical intersections (CIs). Typically only few atoms participate strongly in such an intersection. For the fundamental case, a circular trimer, we show how the CI affects adiabatic excitation transport via electronic decoherence or geometric phase interference. These phenomena may be experimentally accessible if the trimer is realized by light alkali atoms in a ring trap, whose interactions are induced by off-resonant dressing with Rydberg states. Such a setup promises a direct probe of the full many-body density dynamics near a CI.