Pushing spatial boundaries, physicists at Rice University, Texas have discovered a way to control electrons in the Rydberg atom which can help them create synthetic dimensions. In a study published in Nature Communications, all members of the Rice Quantum Initiative including physicists Barry Dunning, Tom Killian, and Kaden Hazzard along with lead author and graduate student Soumya Kanungo detailed their research.
As per the study, the team of researchers applied resonant microwave electric fields to couple many states together and develop the technique to engineer the Rydberg state of ultracold strontium. Scientifically, the Rydberg state occurs when an electron in the atom is energetically moved to a higher excited state. This supersizes the orbit and increases the size of the atom by a thousand times.
The Rice Quantum Initiative researchers coupled lattice-like Rydberg levels in a way that simulates aspects of real materials. They could do this by flexibly and precisely manipulating the electron motion.
According to Phys.org, the Rydberg atoms are characterised by many regularly spaced quantum energy levels. These levels can be coupled by microwaves that enable the excited electron to move to a higher state. Researchers claim that the dynamics of this synthetic dimension are equivalent to a particle moving between lattice sites in a real crystal.
Explaining the study, associate professor of physics and astronomy, Kaden Hazzard said, “In a typical high school experiment, one can see light emission lines from atoms that correspond to transitions from one energy level to another.” He further detailed that by sending different wavelengths of light, the levels can be coupled.
Professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, Tom Killian said that the new finding will enable them to “set up interactions, the way particles move and capture all the important physics of a much more complicated system”.
Professor Killian further claimed that they will be now able to bring multiple Rydberg atoms together to create interacting particles in the new synthetic space. This will help them carry out physics that is not possible to simulate on classic computers as it gets complicated.
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