Observation of Rydberg blockade between two atoms

By E. Urban, T. Johnson, T. Henage, L. Isenhower, D. Yavuz, Thomas G. Walker, Mark Saffman. 2008

825 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When two single Rydberg atoms—those having electrons in highly excited states—interact, one can be used to control the quantum state of the other. Two independent experiments now demonstrate a ‘Rydberg blockade’, an effect that might make long-range quantum gates between neutral atoms possible. Blockade interactions whereby a single particle prevents the flow or excitation of other particles provide a mechanism for control of quantum states, including entanglement of two or more particles. Blockade has been observed for electrons1,2,3, photons4 and cold atoms5. Furthermore, dipolar interactions between highly excited atoms have been proposed as a mechanism for ‘Rydberg blockade’6,7, which might provide a novel approach to a number of quantum protocols8,9,10,11. Dipolar interactions between Rydberg atoms were observed several decades ago12 and have been studied recently in a many-body regime using cold atoms13,14,15,16,17,18. However, to harness Rydberg blockade for controlled quantum dynamics, it is necessary to achieve strong interactions between single pairs of atoms. Here, we demonstrate that a single Rydberg-excited rubidium atom blocks excitation of a second atom located more than 10 μm away. The observed probability of double excitation is less than 20%, consistent with a theoretical model of the Rydberg interaction augmented by Monte Carlo simulations that account for experimental imperfections.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c917dc9eeb5cb3da02b35da969e6ed9ab3025a5

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Citations in the corpus

A Rydberg quantum simulator (2009, background): “Remarkably, the basic building blocks behind such a set-up have been demonstrated recently in the laboratory by several group”
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College (background): “The lack of documents that mention Thatagus is only somewhat ameliorated by three texts that refer to Sa-da-ku-is, "the Sattagydian" (PF789, 2018, 2020) , who was responsible for distributing agricultural produce at Shiraz (Bivar 1988, 208 [after Hallock 1969, 233, 622-4]).”
Coherent excitation of Rydberg atoms in micrometre-sized atomic vapour cells (2010, positive): “tonic quantum devices, like single photon sources and quantum gates [5, 6]. The ﬁrst promising experimental steps towardthis goalusingindividual welllocalizedpairsofultracold atoms have been reported [7, 8]. Experiments on collective entanglement of ensembles of ultracold atoms have also been perfor”
Quantum nonlinear optics with single photons enabled by strongly interacting atoms (2012, neutral): “τc is estimated using the single-atom EIT linewidths (γ EIT , γ 4 EIT , γ ◦ EIT , γ EIT ) = 2π× (6-16,18-26,29-36,50) MHz, and varies from 60 to 330 ns.”
Experimental investigations of dipole–dipole interactions between a few Rydberg atoms (2016, neutral): “Rydberg blockade: the Wisconsin experiment [82]”
Preparation of a single atom in an optical microtrap (2010, methodology): “At present, significant effort is being expended on developing two-qubit gates based on coupling individual Rydberg atoms in adjacent optical microtrap”
Quantum simulations with cold trapped ions (2009, background): “Ifbringing the ions to a highly excited Rydberg state, one would expect an appreciable interactionbetween their electric dipoles [Müller et al. 2008, Urban et al. 2009, Gaetan et al. 2009].”
Quantum simulation and computing with Rydberg-interacting qubits (2020, methodology): “An elegant way to overcome the sensitivity of Rydberg gates to the Rydberg interaction strength was also proposed by Jaksch et al. 22 as ‘Model B’, and ﬁrst experimentally realized by Urban et al. 172 and improved further in Graham et al. 125 .”
Engineered Open Systems and Quantum Simulations with Atoms and Ions (2012, background): “Remarkably, the basic building blocks of Rydbergbased quantum information processing have been demonstrated recently in the laboratory by several groups, which observed the dipole blockade between a pair of neutral Rydberg atoms stored in optical tweezers (Urban et al., 2009; Gaetan et al., 2009).”