Tue May 8, 2012 4:00 pm
Rydberg atoms served hot and cold
Location:26-214
The giant size and large polarizibility of Rydberg-atoms, resulting in strong long-range Rydberg-Rydberg interactions, make them ideal to study many-body effects in ultracold and possibly even in hot atomic gases. First I will present our recent work on the coherent control of Förster resonances in an ultracold cloud of Rubidium atoms. We then admix a small fraction of a Rydberg state to the ground state atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate. We have evidence that by this a fraction of the strong Rydberg-Rydberg interaction is transfered onto the ground state atoms and we monitor a corresponding change in the shape of the condensate.