Rydberg excitation of ultracold atoms in optical lattices

Abstract

Interactions between neutral atoms are generally weak, but exciting these atoms in a Rydberg state considerably enhances their interaction through a long-range dipole-dipole potential. An interesting application of this dipole-dipole interaction is the dipole blockade in Rydberg excitation. This effect offers exciting possibilities for manipulating quantum bits stored in a single collective excitations in mesoscopic ensembles [1], or for realizing scalable quantum logic gates [2]. The dipole blockade effect has been demonstrated in atomic ensembles by different groups, and recently also with two independently trapped atoms, which shows the possibility of creating entangle states and quantum logic gates [3,4]. To extend and continue these results with more atoms, a promising method is to use atoms trapped in an optical lattice in the Mott insulator phase [5].