Abstract
The collective excitation of a gas of highly excited atoms confined to a large spacing ring lattice is studied, where the ground and the excited states are resonantly coupled via a laser field. Attention is focused on the regime where the interaction between the highly excited atoms is very weak in comparison to the Rabi frequency of the laser. In this case, the many-body excitations of the system can be expressed in terms of free spinless fermions. The complex many-particle states arising in this regime are characterized and their properties, for example their correlation functions, are studied. Additional investigation into how some of these many-particle states can actually be experimentally accessed by a temporal variation of the laser parameters is performed.
- Received 11 November 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.81.023604
©2010 American Physical Society
Synopsis
Rydberg rings
Published 22 February 2010
Highly excited atoms arranged in a circular lattice exhibit unusual many-particle states.
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