Science Daily  February 26, 2018 An international team of researchers (USA – Rice University, MIT, Switzerland, Brazil, Austria, Germany) reports spectroscopic observation of Rydberg polarons in an atomic Bose gas. Polarons are created by excitation of Rydberg atoms as impurities in a strontium Bose-Einstein condensate. As computer simulations show, this comparatively weak kind of interaction decreases the total energy of the system, and so a bond between the Rydberg atom and the other atoms inside the electronic orbit is created. This new, weakly bound state of matter is an exciting new possibility of investigating the physics of ultracold atoms… read […]