Ponderomotive optical lattices: a method for trapping Rydberg atoms

Abstract

Summary form only given. Cooling and trapping in atomic systems have ushered in a revolution in the fields of opto-mechanical control, high precision spectroscopy, quantum electrodynamics and quantum information; to date, however, these advances have been restricted almost exclusively to near-ground state atoms. Highly excited atoms, or Rydberg atoms, have been explored for decades as testing grounds for quantum mechanics, quantum chaos, wavepacket manipulation and, more recently, quantum computing. Though the cooling of Rydberg atoms has been proposed and the generation of cold Rydberg atoms from cold ground state atoms has been achieved, the ability to trap cold Rydberg atoms remains an important and unaddressed milestone. We present a method to trap Rydberg atoms in any electronic state based on the weakly-bound nature of the Rydberg electron.