By exciting an atom in an ultra-cold gas to a high lying Rydberg state using a two-step process, a photon can be stored in the cloud in the form of a Rydberg polariton [1]. Due to the Rydberg blockade, the cloud is then unable to absorb another photon and experimentation such as quantum information processing [2] and interferometry [4] can be performed. In my talk, I will begin by presenting an overview of our experiment and some of the work undertaken to bring the platform to a state of experimental readiness. Finally, I will outline a visualisation framework developed to clearly display any arbitrary qutrit state [4] and use this to illustrate some common atomic physics processes.

[1] D. J. Maxwell, D. J. Szwer, D. Paredes-Barato, H. Busche, J. Pritchard, A. Gauguet, K. J. Weatherill, M. Jones, and C. Adams, Storage and Control of Optical Photons Using Rydberg Polaritons, Physical Review Letters 110, (2013).

[2] N. L.  R. Spong, Y. Jiao, O. D.  W. Hughes, K. J. Weatherill, I. Lesanovsky, and C. S. Adams, Collectively Encoded Rydberg Qubit, Physical Review Letters 127, (2021).

[3] Y. Jiao, N. Spong, O. Hughes, C. So, T. Ilieva, K. J. Weatherill, and Charles Stuart Adams, Single-Photon Stored-Light Ramsey Interferometry Using Rydberg Polaritons, Optics Letters 45, 5888 (2020).

[4] M. Z. Festenstein, An Intuitive Visualisation Method for Arbitrary Qutrit (Three Level) States, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.01741.