Inverted-ladder-type optical excitation of potassium Rydberg states with hot and cold ensembles

We present experimental results on the sub-Doppler Rydberg spectroscopy of potassium in a hot cell and cold atoms, using two counterpropagating laser beams of 405 and 980 nm as an inverted ladder-type excitation configuration (4S(1/2)-5P(3/)(2)-nS(1/2) and nD(3/2,5/2)). Such an inverted ladder-type scheme is predicted to be without the sub-Doppler electromagnetically induced transparency feature in a thermal ensemble under the weak-probe approximation. Instead, we utilize a strong probe field and successfully observe a transparency window with a width narrower than 50 MHz. Our all-order numerical simulation is in satisfactory agreement with the experimental results. This narrow linewidth allows us to measure the energy levels of the Rydberg levels from n = 20-70 with improved accuracy. The deduced ionization energy agrees with the previous measurements. Furthermore, the two-photon Rydberg excitation scheme was applied to the cold ensembles to study the ground-state atoms population decrease in the magneto-optical trap for various Rydberg states. Our experimental observations suggested two distinct regimes of the trap losses under different probe detuning conditions. While the far off-resonance case (Delta(p) >> 0) can be described by the picture of dressed atom, the on-resonance case (Delta(p) similar to 0) reveals more interesting results. The higher Rydberg states suffer larger trap loss. Besides, even with similar level energies, the excitation to nD states result in faster escape of the ground-state atom from trap than nearby nS states.