8 September 2016

Our group demonstrate storing a probe pulse as Rydberg polaritons strongly enhances the Rydberg mediated interaction compared to the slow propagation case. The scientific results of this study have been published in Physical Review Letters.

We show that the process is characterized by two time scales. At short storage times, we observe a strong enhancement of the interaction due to the reduction of the Rydberg polariton group velocity down to 0. For longer storage times, we observe a further, weaker enhancement dominated by Rydberg induced dephasing of the multiparticle components of the state. In this regime, we observe a nonlinear dependence of the Rydberg polariton coherence time with the input photon number. Our results have direct consequences in Rydberg quantum optics and may enable the test of new theories of strongly interacting Rydberg systems.

The research team that participated in this study includes Emanuele Distante, Auxiliadora Padrón-Brito, Dr. Matteo Cristiani, Dr. David Paredes-Barato and Prof. Hugues de Riedmatten.

Reference :

Storage Enhanced Nonlinearities in a Cold Atomic Rydberg Ensemble 
E. Distante, A. Padrón-Brito, M. Cristiani, D. Paredes-Barato, and H. de Riedmatten
PRL 117, 113001 (2016) (see also arXiv:1605.07478)