Observation of coherent many-body Rabi oscillations

By Y. Dudin, Lin Li, F. Bariani, A. Kuzmich. Nature Physics, 2012

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A two-level quantum system driven by an electromagnetic field can oscillate between its two states. The effects of these so-called Rabi oscillations are usually obscured in many-body systems by the variation in properties of the particles involved. Now, however, coherent many-body Rabi oscillations are observed in a vapour made up of several hundred cold rubidium atoms. A two-level quantum system coherently driven by a resonant electromagnetic field oscillates sinusoidally between the two levels at frequency Ω (refs 1, 2). In dilute gases, the inhomogeneous distributions of both the coupling strength to the field and the interactions between individual atoms reduce the visibility of these so-called Rabi oscillations and may even suppress them completely. However, in the limit where only a single excitation is present, a collective, many-body Rabi oscillation at a frequency arises that involves all N≫1 atoms, even in inhomogeneous systems3,4. When one of the two levels is a strongly interacting Rydberg level, many-body Rabi oscillations emerge as a consequence of a phenomenon known as Rydberg excitation blockade5. Here we report initial observations of coherent many-body Rabi oscillations between the ground level and a Rydberg level using several hundred cold rubidium atoms, with a 0.67(10) preparation efficiency of the singly-excited many-body state. The strongly pronounced oscillations indicate a nearly complete excitation blockade of the entire mesoscopic ensemble by a single excited atom.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f969c2e0d57a657d844948a4547f65fefeba4b48

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Geometry of quantum phase transitions (2019, unknown): “Examples of suitable experimental platforms for the implementation and simulation of such an open many-body framework range from ultra-cold atoms in optical lattices [124, 364], to ion traps [365, 366], to cavity microarrays [367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 143] and Rydberg atoms [373, 374].”
Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator (2017, background): “gN 〉) with the characteristic √ N -scaling of the collective Rabi frequency [24, 28, 29].”