Towards Rydberg Excitation of Sodium Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensates

We present our progress towards Rydberg excitation of our sodium spinor BEC to study the effect of impurities on coherent spin-mixing dynamics. Spin-mixing dynamics convert pairs of atoms with magnetic quantum numbers m_F=0 to entangled pairs with m_F=+1 and m_F=-1, useful for quantum-enhanced sensing. To study the effect of Rydberg impurities on the spin dynamics, we designed a blue laser locking system for Rydberg excitation, as well as a custom pulsed-field ionization spectrometer for Rydberg atom detection. Our system will generate Rydberg impurities by exciting the valance electron of Na BEC atoms far away from the nucleus with a two-photon process from 3s to nd states, where n will range between 40 and 90 in our case. In this poster, we present the design progress of our Rydberg atom excitation and detection systems.