Optical Imaging of Rydberg Atoms

We present an experiment exploring electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in Rydberg atoms in order to observe optical nonlinearities at the single photon level. 87Rb atoms are trapped and cooled using a magneto-optical trap (MOT) and a far off resonance dipole trap (FORT). Once the system is prepared, a ladder EIT scheme with Rydberg atoms is used to map the photon field onto the ensemble. The powerful dipole interaction between Rydberg atoms allows the system to exhibit many-body quantum mechanical effects. We also describe an imaging method to observe the Rydberg blockade. Last of all, we present a preliminary measurement of EIT in a Rydberg system. In this measurement, the transmission shows sensitivity to the applied photon flux, and exhibits temporal correlations in the photons exiting the EIT medium