Universal response of Rydberg manifolds to standing light waves from the microwave to the X-ray regime
Standing light waves structure the electronic density of a Rydberg atom in a rich but surprisingly systematic fashion. We uncover these systematics, which are nearly universal across a large range of principal quantum numbers n, by varying the wavelength of the standing light over several orders of magnitude. Thereby, we identify five qualitatively different regimes and give their transition criteria in terms of specific critical wavelengths. The bandwidth of the lattice spectrum, manifested in the difference of energies between the states on the edges of the degeneracy-lifted n-manifolds, as well as the organization of the electron density in coordinate and momentum space are used to rationalize the systematics. A experimental setup is proposed to measure the features in the different regimes.