title: Resonant Rydberg Dressing of Alkaline-Earth Atoms via Electromagnetically Induced Transparency.
abstract: We develop an approach to generate finite-range atomic interactions via optical Rydberg-state excitation and study the underlying excitation dynamics in theory and experiment. In contrast to previous work, the proposed scheme is based on resonant optical driving and the establishment of a dark state under conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). Analyzing the driven dissipative dynamics of the atomic gas, we show that the interplay between coherent light coupling, radiative decay, and strong Rydberg-Rydberg atom interactions leads to the emergence of sizable effective interactions while providing remarkably long coherence times. The latter are studied experimentally in a cold gas of strontium atoms for which the proposed scheme is most efficient. Our measured atom loss is in agreement with the theoretical prediction based on binary effective interactions between the driven atoms.
authors.affiliation: Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Straße 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Gaul
authors.affiliation: Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy and Rice Center for Quantum Materials, Houston, Texas 77251, USA.
authors.forename: B J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: DeSalvo
authors.affiliation: Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy and Rice Center for Quantum Materials, Houston, Texas 77251, USA.
authors.forename: J A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Aman
authors.affiliation: Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy and Rice Center for Quantum Materials, Houston, Texas 77251, USA.
authors.forename: F B
authors.initials: FB
authors.lastname: Dunning
authors.affiliation: Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy and Rice Center for Quantum Materials, Houston, Texas 77251, USA.
authors.forename: T C
authors.initials: TC
authors.lastname: Killian
authors.affiliation: Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Straße 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Pohl