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Published May 2020 | Accepted Version + Published
Journal Article Open

Inverted-ladder-type optical excitation of potassium Rydberg states with hot and cold ensembles

Abstract

We present experimental results on the sub-Doppler Rydberg spectroscopy of potassium in a hot cell and cold atoms, using two counterpropagating laser beams of 405 and 980 nm as an inverted ladder-type excitation configuration (4S_(1/2)−5P_(3/2)−nS_(1/2) and nD_(3/2,5/2)). Such an inverted ladder-type scheme is predicted to be without the sub-Doppler electromagnetically induced transparency feature in a thermal ensemble under the weak-probe approximation. Instead, we utilize a strong probe field and successfully observe a transparency window with a width narrower than 50 MHz. Our all-order numerical simulation is in satisfactory agreement with the experimental results. This narrow linewidth allows us to measure the energy levels of the Rydberg levels from n = 20–70 with improved accuracy. The deduced ionization energy agrees with the previous measurements. Furthermore, the two-photon Rydberg excitation scheme was applied to the cold ensembles to study the ground-state atoms population decrease in the magneto-optical trap for various Rydberg states. Our experimental observations suggested two distinct regimes of the trap losses under different probe detuning conditions. While the far off-resonance case (Δ_p≫0) can be described by the picture of dressed atom, the on-resonance case (Δ_p∼0) reveals more interesting results. The higher Rydberg states suffer larger trap loss. Besides, even with similar level energies, the excitation to nD states result in faster escape of the ground-state atom from trap than nearby nS states.

Additional Information

© 2020 American Physical Society. Received 3 November 2019; revised manuscript received 18 February 2020; accepted 14 April 2020; published 12 May 2020. Research was supported by the Center for Quantum Technology from the Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan, and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) under Grants No. 106-2112-M-007-021-MY3 and No. 105-2112-M-007-027-MY3.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevA.101.052507.pdf

Accepted Version - 1912.06741.pdf

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