Inverted Ladder Type Optical Excitation of Potassium Rydberg States with Hot and Cold Ensembles

TL;DR

This study demonstrates sub-Doppler Rydberg spectroscopy of potassium using an inverted ladder scheme with strong probe fields, achieving narrow linewidths and detailed energy level measurements, and explores trap loss dynamics in cold ensembles.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental observation of sub-Doppler transparency in an inverted ladder scheme with strong probing and compares results with numerical simulations, advancing Rydberg spectroscopy techniques.

Findings

Narrow linewidths (<50 MHz) observed in hot and cold ensembles.

Energy levels of Rydberg states (n=20-70) measured with high accuracy.

Distinct trap loss regimes identified for different probe detunings and Rydberg states.

Abstract

We present experimental results on the sub-Doppler Rydberg spectroscopy of potassium in a hot cell and cold atoms, performed with two counter-propagating laser beams of 405 nm and 980 nm in the inverted ladder-type system (4S1/2-5P3/2-nS1/2 and nD3/2;5/2). Such an inverted ladder-type scheme is predicted to be without sub-Doppler electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) feature in a thermal ensemble under the weak-probe approximation. Instead, we utilized a strong probe field and successfully observed a transparency window with a width narrower than 50~MHz. Our all-order numerical simulation is in satisfactory agreement with the experimental results. This narrow linewidth allows us to measure the energy levels of the Rydberg levels from $n$=20-70 with improved accuracy. The deduced ionization energy agrees with the previous measurements. Furthermore, the two-photon Rydberg excitation scheme was applied to the cold ensembles to study the ground-state atoms population decrease in the MOT for various Rydberg states. Our experimental observations suggested two distinct regimes of the trap losses under different probe detuning conditions. While the far off-resonance case (\delta p>>0) can be described by the picture of dressed atom, the on-resonance case (\delta p~0) reveals more interesting results. The higher Rydberg states suffer larger trap loss. Besides, even with similar level energies, the excitation to nD states result in faster escape of the ground-state atom from trap than nearby nS states.