Alkali Rydberg Atoms for Non-Destructive Molecule Readout

Ultracold polar molecules are a promising platform for quantum simulation due to an abundance of states with kHz-scale dipolar interactions and 100 second scale lifetimes. A present challenge for bialkali molecules is the absence of a closed optical cycling transition, requiring dissociation into constituent atoms for detection. We present work towards the non-destructive readout of NaCs molecules in optical tweezers using Cs Rydberg atoms. Due to their large electric dipole moments, Rydberg atoms can acquire a phase sensitive to the state of the molecule by engineering a dipolar resonance. In this poster, we first address the delocalization of Cs Rydberg atoms due to ponderomotive repulsion from optical traps. We investigate the viability of vector polarizability trapping for confinement following a recent proposal. In disagreement, we measure the vector polarizability is near zero for the 54S, 54P, and 53D states of Cs atoms and approaches zero in the large-n limit. Furthermore, we coherently excite multiple Cs Rydberg states and demonstrate an improvement of the Rabi coherence time by cancelling external electric fields using out-of-vacuum on-chip electrodes.