Many-body Physics with Alkaline-Earth Rydberg lattices

TL;DR

This paper investigates trapping alkaline-earth Rydberg atoms in optical lattices, focusing on strontium, and explores their potential for creating many-body GHZ states using attractive interactions and magic wavelengths.

Contribution

It identifies magic wavelengths for trapping strontium Rydberg atoms and analyzes their lifetime and interactions, proposing a method to generate GHZ states.

Findings

Magic wavelengths for trapping ground and Rydberg states are identified.

The lifetime is limited mainly by Rydberg state decay, not photoionization.

Attractive van der Waals interactions enable GHZ state generation.

Abstract

We explore the prospects for confining alkaline-earth Rydberg atoms in an optical lattice via optical dressing of the secondary core valence electron. Focussing on the particular case of strontium, we identify experimentally accessible magic wavelengths for simultaneous trapping of ground and Rydberg states. A detailed analysis of relevant loss mechanisms shows that the overall lifetime of such a system is limited only by the spontaneous decay of the Rydberg state, and is not significantly affected by photoionization or autoionization. The van der Waals C_6 coefficients for the 5sns series are calculated, and we find that the interactions are attractive. Finally we show that the combination of magic-wavelength lattices and attractive interactions could be exploited to generate many-body Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states.