Deterministic single-atom excitation via adiabatic passage and Rydberg blockade

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using adiabatic rapid passage with a chirped laser pulse in the strong dipole blockade regime to reliably excite a single Rydberg atom from randomly loaded traps, overcoming previous limitations related to atom number dependence.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a technique that achieves deterministic single-atom excitation regardless of the number of atoms in the trap, addressing a key challenge in quantum control.

Findings

Method is insensitive to atom number N in traps.

Overcomes the √N dependence of collective Rabi frequency.

Applicable for single-atom loading in optical traps and lattices.

Abstract

We propose to use adiabatic rapid passage with a chirped laser pulse in the strong dipole blockade regime to deterministically excite only one Rydberg atom from randomly loaded optical dipole traps or optical lattices. The chirped laser excitation is shown to be insensitive to the random number \textit{N} of the atoms in the traps. Our method overcomes the problem of the $\sqrt {N} $ dependence of the collective Rabi frequency, which was the main obstacle for deterministic single-atom excitation in the ensembles with unknown \textit{N}, and can be applied for single-atom loading of dipole traps and optical lattices.