Many-body dynamics of holes in a driven, dissipative spin chain of Rydberg superatoms

Abstract

Strong, long-range interactions between atoms in high-lying Rydberg states can suppress multiple Rydberg excitations within a micron-sized trapping volume and yield sizable Rydberg level shifts at larger distances. Ensembles of atoms in optical microtraps then form Rydberg superatoms with collectively enhanced transition rates to the singly excited state. These superatoms can represent mesoscopic, strongly interacting spins. We study a regular array of such effective spins driven by a laser field tuned to compensate the interaction-induced level shifts between neighboring superatoms. During the initial transient, a few excited superatoms seed a cascade of resonantly facilitated excitation of large clusters of superatoms. Due to spontaneous decay, the system then relaxes to the steady state having nearly universal Rydberg excitation density 2 3 R r = . This state is characterized by highly non-trivial equilibrium dynamics of quasi-particles-excitation holes in the lattice of Rydberg excited superatoms. We derive an effective many-body model that accounts for hole mobility as well as continuous creation and annihilation of holes upon collisions with each other. We find that holes exhibit a nearly incompressible liquid phase with highly sub-Poissonian number statistics and finiterange density-density correlations.

Expansion behavior and pair correlations in continuously excited Rydberg systems

“…We have focused on how pair correlations, the excitation number distribution, and the counting statistics behave on timescales that exceed the Rydberg-atom decay time and timescale on which the potential energy of the photoexcited system becomes converted into kinetic energy. Our results are relevant to the understanding of many-body effects in such systems, including the specific role of the continual excitation [13,32]. A large number of physical processes are important in this continuously pumped Rydberg-atom system, including radiative black-body transitions, energyexchanged collisions, ionization, and collisions between Rydberg atoms and charged particles.…”

Preparation of hundreds of microscopic atomic ensembles in optical tweezer arrays

“…Furthermore, we show that the fluctuations of the number of atoms in each tweezer is comparable to, or below the shot-noise limit for uncorrelated atoms. These properties make the system well suited for quantum simulation of quantum spin models 13,14,17,[34][35][36][37][38][39] and dynamics [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47] in novel geometries, as well as for realizing quantum registers with collectively enhanced atom-light interactions for quantum information processing 11,36,[48][49][50][51] .…”

Making rare events typical in Markovian open quantum systems

“…Note, that such collective jump operators may be challenging to implement experimentally. They may be realized as an emergent dynamics of a strongly interacting system in a perturbative limit -similar to kinetic constraints in dissipative Rydberg gases [59][60][61]. A further possibility is to engineer them using digital quantum simulation protocols which have been demonstrated in ion traps [62].…”