A Rydberg-dressed Magneto-Optical Trap
A. D. Bounds, N. C. Jackson, R. K. Hanley, R. Faoro, E. M. Bridge, P., Huillery, and M. P. A. Jones

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates laser cooling and trapping of Rydberg-dressed Sr atoms, enabling tunable long-range interactions at ultracold temperatures, which could advance quantum simulation and many-body physics.
Contribution
It introduces a novel method to create a Rydberg-dressed magneto-optical trap with enhanced electric polarizability and tunable interactions.
Findings
Achieved ultracold Rydberg-dressed Sr atom trapping at sub-microkelvin temperatures.
Reached high atomic densities where Rydberg interactions are comparable to kinetic energy.
Showed potential for combining laser cooling with long-range tunable interactions.
Abstract
We propose and demonstrate the laser cooling and trapping of Rydberg-dressed Sr atoms. By off-resonantly coupling the excited state of a narrow (7 kHz) cooling transition to a high-lying Rydberg state, we transfer Rydberg properties such as enhanced electric polarizability to a stable magneto-optical trap operating at . By increasing the density to , we show that it is possible to reach a regime where the long-range interaction between Rydberg-dressed atoms becomes comparable to the kinetic energy, opening a route to combining laser cooling with tunable long-range interactions.
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