Effects of molecular resonances on Rydberg blockade

TL;DR

This paper investigates how molecular resonances in Rydberg atoms affect the Rydberg blockade, revealing that these resonances can cause loss and inhomogeneous shifts, and discusses methods to mitigate these effects.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of molecular resonances in Rydberg atoms and their impact on blockade control, including calculations of interaction potentials and mitigation strategies.

Findings

Molecular resonances occur at short interatomic distances in Rydberg atoms.

Resonances cause loss and inhomogeneous light shifts during Rydberg excitation.

Strategies to avoid molecular resonance effects are discussed.

Abstract

We study the effect of resonances associated with complex molecular interaction of Rydberg atoms on Rydberg blockade. We show that densely-spaced molecular potentials between doubly-excited atomic pairs become unavoidably resonant with the optical excitation at short interatomic separations. Such molecular resonances limit the coherent control of individual excitations in Rydberg blockade. As an illustration, we compute the molecular interaction potentials of Rb atoms near the $100s$ states asymptote to characterize such detrimental molecular resonances, determine the resonant loss rate to molecules and inhomogeneous light shifts. Techniques to avoid the undesired effect of molecular resonances are discussed.