Ultracold Medium Research Articles

Mapping trilobite state signatures in atomic hydrogen

A few-body approach relying on static line broadening theory is developed to treat the spectroscopy of a single Rydberg excitation to a trilobite-like state immersed in a high density ultracold medium. The present theoretical framework implements the recently developed compact treatment of polyatomic Rydberg molecules, allowing for an accurate treatment of a large number of perturbers within the Rydberg orbit. This system exhibits two unique spectral signatures: its lineshape depends on the Rydberg quantum number n but, strikingly, is independent of the density of the medium, and it is characterized by sharply peaked features reflecting the oscillatory structure of the potential energy landscape.

One-dimensional ultracold medium of extreme optical depth

We report on the preparation of a one-dimensional ultracold medium in a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber, reaching an effective optical depth of 1000(150). We achieved this extreme optical depth by transferring atoms from a magneto-optical trap into a far-detuned optical dipole trap inside the hollow-core fiber, yielding up to 2.5(3)×10(5) atoms inside the core with a loading efficiency of 2.5(6)%. The preparation of an ultracold medium of such huge optical depth paves the way toward new applications in quantum optics and nonlinear optics.

Thermometry of ultracold atoms by electromagnetically induced transparency

We report on systematic numerical and experimental investigations of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) to determine temperatures in an ultracold atomic gas. The technique relies on the strong dependence of EIT on atomic motion (i.e., Doppler shifts), when the relevant atomic transitions are driven with counterpropagating probe and control laser beams. Electromagnetically induced transparency permits thermometry with satisfactory precision over a large temperature range, which can be addressed by the appropriate choice of Rabi frequency in the control beam. In contrast to time-of-flight techniques, thermometry by EIT is fast and nondestructive, i.e., essentially it does not affect the ultracold medium. In an experimental demonstration we apply both EIT and time-of-flight measurements to determine temperatures along different symmetry axes of an anisotropic ultracold gas. As an interesting feature we find that the temperatures in the anisotropic atom cloud vary in different directions.

Storage states in ultracold collective atoms

We present a complete theoretical description of atomic storage states in the multimode framework by including spatial coherence in atomic collective operators and atomic storage states. We show that atomic storage states are Dicke states with the maximum cooperation number. In some limits, a set of multimode atomic storage states has been established in correspondence with multimode Fock states of the electromagnetic field. This gives better understanding of both the quantum and coherent information of optical field can be preserved and recovered in ultracold medium. In this treatment, we discuss in detail both the adiabatic and dynamic transfer of quantum information between the field and the ultracold medium.