  We show how to create long range interactions between alkali-atoms in
different hyper-fine ground states, allowing coherent electronic quantum state
migration. The scheme uses off resonant dressing with atomic Rydberg states,
exploiting the dipole-dipole excitation transfer that is possible between
those. Actual population in the Rydberg state is kept small. Dressing offers
large advantages over the direct use of Rydberg levels: It reduces ionisation
probabilities and provides an additional tuning parameter for life-times and
interaction-strengths. We present an effective Hamiltonian for the ground-state
manifold and show that it correctly describes the full multi-state dynamics for
up to 5 atoms.
