Submission Date

7-19-2024

Document Type

Paper

Department

Physics & Astronomy

Faculty Mentor

Thomas Carroll

Comments

Presented during the 26th Annual Summer Fellows Symposium, July 19, 2024 at Ursinus College.

Supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.

Project Description

The energy exchange between ultracold, highly-excited, or Rydberg, atoms can be used to model quantum mechanical systems. When interpreting the results of these systems, it is important to know the density of the Rydberg atoms. In a recent experiment, we have studied several clusters of states that form a nearly harmonic ladder of clusters. The Rydberg atoms all start in one energy cluster, and the interactions between them allows energy to spread to all the other states. We have developed new analysis software along with a method in which a simple four-level system can calibrate the density for our experiment. This system has two- and three-body interactions which each depend differently on the density. We run many computer simulations with different densities of atoms in the initial state and store the time-dependence of the distribution of atoms among the four states. We compare our simulations to the experiment and pick the density that best fits the data. We present preliminary results of our analysis.

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