Ion Imaging via Long-Range Interaction with Rydberg Atoms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel ion imaging technique using ion-Rydberg atom interactions and electromagnetically induced transparency, enabling visualization of ion distributions and dynamics in cold atomic gases with minimal disturbance.

Contribution

The authors develop a new imaging method based on ion-Rydberg interactions and EIT, allowing for time-resolved, minimally invasive visualization of ions in cold atomic systems.

Findings

Successfully imaged ion clouds in atomic gases.

Mapped avalanche ionization dynamics of Rydberg gases.

Demonstrated minimal perturbation during imaging.

Abstract

We demonstrate imaging of ions in an atomic gas with ion-Rydberg atom interaction induced absorption. This is made possible by utilizing a multi-photon electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) scheme and the extremely large electric polarizability of a Rydberg state with high orbital angular momentum. We process the acquired images to obtain the distribution of ion clouds and to spectroscopically investigate the effect of the ions on the EIT resonance. Furthermore, we show that our method can be employed to image the dynamics of ions in a time resolved way. As an example, we map out the avalanche ionization of a gas of Rydberg atoms. The minimal disruption and the flexibility offered by this imaging technique make it ideally suited for the investigation of cold hybrid ion-atom systems.