Latest Rydberg state Stories
Atomic blockade Using lasers to excite just one atom from a cloud of ultra-cold rubidium gas, physicists have developed a new way to rapidly and efficiently create single photons for potential use in optical quantum information processing – and in the study of dynamics and disorder in certain physical systems. The technique takes advantage of the unique properties of atoms that have one or more electrons excited to a condition of near-ionization known as the Rydberg state. Atoms in...
UC Riverside physicists have launched a lab experiment to find out the answer Does antimatter behave differently in gravity than matter? Physicists at the University of California, Riverside have set out to determine the answer. Should they find it, it could explain why the universe seems to have no antimatter and why it is expanding at an ever increasing rate. In the lab, the researchers took the first step towards measuring the free fall of "positronium" – a bound state between a...
In an achievement that could help enable fast quantum computers, University of Michigan physicists have built a better Rydberg atom trap. Rydberg atoms are highly excited, nearly-ionized giants that can be thousands of times larger than their ground-state counterparts.As a result of their size, interactions between Rydberg atoms can be roughly a million times stronger than between regular atoms. This is why they could serve as faster quantum circuits, said Georg Raithel, associate chair and...
U.S. physicists say they have discovered giant Rydberg atom molecules with a bond as large as a red blood cell. The University of Oklahoma researchers led by Professor James Shaffer said determining how Rydberg molecules interact is important because Rydberg atoms are a key ingredient in atom based quantum computation schemes. The scientists said giant Rydberg molecules are formed when two Rydberg atoms interact. A Rydberg atom is an atom that has at least one electron orbiting the nucleus...
Scientists say the Rydberg molecule, a molecule that until now existed only in theory, has finally been created, BBC News reported.The molecule is formed through an elusive and extremely weak chemical bond between two atoms.Researchers reported in the journal Nature that the new type of bonding occurs when one of the two atoms in the molecule has an electron very far from its nucleus or center.Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi developed fundamental quantum theories about how...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Max Planck Institute for Physics in Germany believe they can achieve a significant increase in the accuracy of one of the fundamental constants of nature by boosting an electron to an orbit as far as possible from the atomic nucleus that binds it. The experiment, outlined in a new paper, would not only mean more accurate identifications of elements in everything from stars to environmental pollutants but also could...
