Rydberg

STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS

Trapped Rydberg ions are a novel quantum system. By laser light, the outermost electron of trapped ions is excited to high-lying orbitals. Such Rydberg ions are million times bigger than ions in the ground state, and due to their size, they obtain very peculiar properties. For instance, they have very large transition dipole moments thus become very sensitive to microwave fields.