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Tuesday
| October 31 2006 | 4:00 p.m. | MIT Room 26-214
Jae Hoon Choi
(MIT)
Rydberg atoms and neutral plasmas: Cold, magnetized, and trapped
I will discuss our recent demonstration of the trapping of cold
Rydberg atoms and ultracold quasi-neutral plasmas in a
high-magnetic-field trap. Trapped Rydberg atoms in high-angular
momentum states have unique properties such as long lifetimes
(measured values up to 80~ms) and large magnetic moments (measured
values about 8~Bohr magneton). The Rydberg-atom trapping technique
exploits the quasi-free nature of Rydberg electrons, which can be
adopted in other forms of Ryd\-berg-atom trapping. In related
work, we have trapped two-component ultracold plasmas in a nested
Penning-trap configuration. By confining both ions and electrons,
we observed correlations between ionic oscillations and the
electron energy distribution. Future prospects will be outlined,
including the realization of neutral plasmas in a novel,
strong-coupling regime.
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