Tayloring Bose-Einstein condensate environments for a Rydberg impurity

Abstract: Experiments have demonstrated that atoms excited to specific Rydberg states within Bose-Einstein condensates cause significant excitation of phonons. If the Rydberg atom is brought into an electronic superposition state, this coupling to phonons leads to decoherence. We provide the theoretical basis for the treatment of the latter. To this end, we evaluate Rydberg-phonon coupling coefficients using a combination of analytical and numerical techniques. From these coefficients, we calculate bath correlation functions, spectral densities and re-organisation energies. All these quantify the influence of the environment and form essential inputs for follow up open quantum system techniques. We find that the amplitude of bath correlations scales like the power law $\nu^{-5}$ with the principal quantum number $\nu$, while re-organisation energies scale like $\nu^{-3}$, reflecting the extreme tunability of Rydberg atomic properties. Rydberg impurities in condensates thus constitute a non-trivial open-quantum system with exceptionally controlled system, coupling and environmental Hamiltonians.