Electromagnetically induced transparency of an interacting cold Rydberg ensemble

K J Weatherill, J D Pritchard, R P Abel, M G Bason, A K Mohapatra, C S Adams
2008 Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics  
We study electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) of a weakly interacting cold Rydberg gas. We show that the onset of interactions is manifest as a depopulation of the Rydberg state and numerically model this effect by adding a density-dependent non-linear term to the optical Bloch equations. In the limit of a weak probe where the depopulation effect is negligible, we observe no evidence of interaction induced decoherence and obtain a narrow Rydberg dark resonance with a linewidth of <600
more » ... kHz, limited by the Rabi frequency of the coupling beam
doi:10.1088/0953-4075/41/20/201002 fatcat:mdopjy33dbdi5bjcnzgk3axgxy