Visualization and interpretation of Rydberg states

Abstract

For many purposes it is desirable to have an easily understandable and accurate picture of the atomic states. This is especially true for the highly excited states which exhibit features not present in the well known states hydrogen-like orbitals with usual values of the quantum numbers. It could be expected that such visualizations are readily available. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We illustrate the problems by showing several less fortunate earlier presentations in some scientifically most valuable works, and show more suitable visualizations for those cases. The selected cases are not chosen to criticize the authors' approach. Rather, we have taken these very important papers to underline the need for serious work with graphical representations which this work attempts to be a part of. In this text we discuss the problems encountered when visualizing Rydberg states, review some existing presentations and propose guidelines for applications. The focus of this work are so called Stark states and coherent elliptic states of Rydberg atoms. In the sections on elliptic states we show some quite novel geometric interpretations which should be very helpful in analysis of Rydberg state manipulations in external fields. Our demonstration examples involve only hydrogen-like states. However, the techniques and analysis are also relevant for Rydberg molecules and more complicated highly excited atomic and molecular systems.