Study of Rydberg blockade in thermal vapor

Abstract

We present the experimental demonstration of Rydberg blockade in thermal atomic vapor where the atoms are not necessarily be frozen. We show that not all the interacting atoms but only the atoms with same velocity collectively participate in the blockade process. Using this observation, we formulated a suitable model based on super atom picture to study blockade interaction in thermal vapor. We performed an experiment to measure Rydberg population in rubidium thermal vapor using optical heterodyne detection technique and density dependent suppression of Rydberg population is observed in suitable experimental parameter regime. Further analysis of the experimental data using the model verifies the scaling law for van der Waals interaction strength $(C_{6})$ with principal quantum number of the Rydberg state with $11\%$ error. Our result suggests multi-photon excitation in thermal vapor with suitable laser configuration to probe Rydberg blockade interaction based optical nonlinearity and many body effects.