Atoms in highly excited Rydberg states exhibit remarkable properties such as large polarizability and strong interactions. This makes them interesting for a manifold of applications ranging from electric field sensors to carriers and mediators of quantum information and renders them into a powerful tool for studying quantum phenomena in strongly interacting many-particle systems. In this article we illuminate perspectives for the study of the relaxation and thermalization dynamics of closed many-body quantum systems using alkali atoms that are held in a ring lattice and excited to Rydberg states. Moreover, we show that Rydberg atoms confined to lattices offer exciting possibilities for the creation of entangled many-body quantum states which can serve as a resource for the generation of non-classical light.
Atoms in highly excited Rydberg states exhibit remarkable properties such as large polarizability and strong interactions. This makes them interesting for a manifold of applications ranging from electric field sensors to carriers and mediators of quantum information and renders them into a powerful tool for studying quantum phenomena in strongly interacting many-particle systems. In this article we illuminate perspectives for the study of the relaxation and thermalization dynamics of closed many-body quantum systems using alkali atoms that are held in a ring lattice and excited to Rydberg states. Moreover, we show that Rydberg atoms confined to lattices offer exciting possibilities for the creation of entangled many-body quantum states which can serve as a resource for the generation of non-classical light.
Ultra-cold atoms in optical lattices provide a versatile and robust platform to study fundamental condensed-matter physics problems and have applications in quantum optics as well as quantum information processing. For many of these applications, Rydberg atoms (atoms excited to large principal quantum numbers) are ideal due to its long coherence times and strong interactions. However, one of the pre-requisite for such applications is identical confinement of ground state atoms with Rydberg atoms. This is challenging for conventionally used alkali atoms. In this thesis, I discuss the potential of using alkaline-earth Rydberg atoms for many-body physics by implementing simultaneous trapping for the relevant internal states. In particular, I consider a scheme for generating multi-particle entanglement and explore charge transport in a one dimensional atomic lattice.
Interacting Rydberg excitations in cold atomic ensembles can exhibit large quantum nonlinearities that enable engineering of strong interactions between individual photons. Consequently, Rydberg ensembles are a promising platform for quantum information applications and the study of more fundamental physics of few- and many-body phenomena with interacting photons. This thesis presents a series of experiments that study and exploit different regimes of Rydberg-mediated interactions. We report the realization of an efficient on-demand single-photon source. The strong long-range Rydberg interactions allow the excitation of only a single collective Rydberg state within the entire atomic medium. The collective excitation can be subsequently retrieved as a single-photon. We use this scheme to generate highly pure and highly indistinguishable photons, which are suitable for scalable quantum information applications. These photons can be compatible with other atomic systems due to their narrow bandwidth, which makes building practical hybrid quantum systems feasible. Here, we demonstrate high visibility two-photon quantum interference between our Rydberg-produced photons, and photons emitted by a remote single-trapped ion. We also study Rydberg atoms under electromagnetically induced transparency conditions, where coherent superpostions of photons and Rydberg excitations propagate through the atomic medium as lossless dark-state polaritons. In the experiment, we use the external control fields to tune the interactions to a many-body regime where we can observe resonant scattering of dark-state polaritons to lossy channels. We show that the enhanced scattering process arises as a pure three-body effect.
Rydberg atoms are often proposed as the basis of quantum computing and quantum information protocols. One of the central reasons for this is that they provide a strong and long-ranged interaction that can be coherently switched on and off. This thesis details two techniques which use the exaggerated properties of Rydberg atoms to manipulate both the quantum state of the atom itself and that of the external light field.\n\nThe first proposal initially focuses on the creation of many-body quantum states from two-level atoms trapped in a two-dimensional lattice. This approach uses the van der Waals interaction present between alkali metal atoms in highly excited Rydberg s-states. The approximate solution of the corresponding Hamiltonian is detailed in the regime where the laser driving is the largest energy scale of the system. The states which are most likely achieved using an oscillating laser detuning are then determined. These states are then taken as the basis for the creation of deterministic single-photons, whose properties are shown to rely on the interplay between interatomic spacing and the geometry of the lattice.\n\nThe second technique described uses the coupling between a Rydberg atom and a moving electron to manipulate the atomic state. In this system, the atom is initially excited to a Rydberg s-state and trapped at a finite distance from an electron waveguide. Two analytical methods are used to show that the final state of the atom depends strongly on the direction and modulus of the electron momentum. A complementary numerical simulation shows that the atoms may be left in a polarised state, suggesting the possibility of using this setup to ‘switch on’ permanent electric dipoles in the atoms. This investigation leads naturally to a system where multiple interacting atoms are trapped close to the waveguide, allowing various many-body states to be accessed.
The remarkable progress in control over cold atomic gases has led to a point where people are no longer satisfied with merely studying these systems, but rather put them to use to understand complex quantum many-body systems. The basis of this development is a deep understanding of the interaction between atoms, and how to exploit those in order to engineer interesting and novel quantum-systems. The aim of this particular thesis is to contribute to this third quantum revolution [1] and hence help to understand the inner workings of complex many-body systems. We present a method to control the shape and character of the interaction between cold atoms based on dressing the atomic ground-state with a Rydberg-state. The latter induces a van der Waals interaction between all the atoms in the ensemble, and allows for control via the coupling light-field. We find that with increasing atom densities the ensemble shows a direct transition into a collective regime that preempts the onset of three-body interactions associated with a break-down of the first Born-approximation. The reason for this intriguing behavior is the strong interaction between Rydberg atoms that gives rise to the blockade-mechanism, and prevents the simultaneous excitation to the Rydberg-state for spatially close atoms. The non-trivial behavior of the interaction-potential within the collective regime yields a novel tool for shaping the interaction between ground-state atoms beyond s-wave scattering. We study this collective regime and the resulting interaction-potential between the atoms within a variational/mean-field approach, and discuss its effects on a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate. Artificial atoms show remarkable properties, that are often superior to real atoms. In particular, since they are built out of many constituents, such systems often exhibit an enhanced coupling to the light-field as well as strong optical non-linearities even for small light-fields. On the other hand, noise in quantum-mechanical systems can not only destroy coherence, but rather can be used in order to robustly drive a system into an interesting state. We study the effect of a controlled dephasing onto an artificial atom in the context of an ensemble of atoms coherently coupled to a Rydberg state and demonstrate that such an enhanced artificial atom allows for the deterministic absorption of a single photon from an arbitrary incoming probe field. Such behavior yields a unique tool in light-matter interaction, and opens the path to realise quantum-networks or to fabricate novel quantum-devices. Here, we discuss the applicability of this single-photon absorber as a single-photon transistor, a high fidelity n-photon counter, and a device that allows for the deterministic creation of non-classical states of light via photon-subtraction. A non-trivial topological order of quantum-states leads to conservation of certain properties and, hence, increases their robustness against external perturbations. This can even stabilize quantum-states against local fluctuations. The latter usually corrupts the coherence within a macroscopic object and thereby prevents quantum-phenomena to occur in our macroscopic world. As an example of such a topological state, we study the behavior of vortex-excitations in a two-dimensional superfluid confined to a periodic potential, as can be realised within a cold atomic gas in an optical lattice. For large superfluid filling factors and strong interactions, the healing-length and, accordingly, the vortex core is much smaller than the lattice spacing. As a result, vortices are confined to the plaquettes of the lattice, and can be described in the framework of an effective tight-binding Hamiltonian. Via a first-principle calculation based on coherent-state path-integrals we derive the microscopic parameters of this model and provide an analytic expression for the vortex mass. Moreover, we show that such a quantum vortex is not obliged to follow the superfluid flow, but rather exhibits Bloch-oscillations perpendicular to it, which is a telltale sign for quantum interference of this macroscopic many-body excitation. Recently, Jonathan Simon et al. [2] performed a major step towards simulating quantum many-body systems in cold atomic gases by simulating the paramagnet-antiferro-magnet transition of a one-dimensional Ising-model. Fundamental excitations in the phase with broken translational symmetry are domain-walls carrying fractional statistics. The question is, whether experimentally accessible single-particle excitations, which correspond to two closely-bound domain-walls, decay into fractional excitations or remain closely-bound. By use of perturbation theory, we derive an analytic model for the time-evolution of these fractional excitations in the framework of a tilted Bose-Hubbard model, and demonstrate the existence of a repulsively bound state above a critical center-of-mass momentum. The validity of the perturbative approach is confirmed by the use of t-DMRG simulations. Together with the recent demonstration of single-site addressing and readout in optical lattices, these findings open the path for experimental observation of fractional excitations within cold atomic gases.
Recent achievements in ultra-cold experiments have made quantum simulation of interacting many-body systems possible in a well controllable environment. Of many candidates as quantum simulators, Rydberg atoms have been extensively utilised due to its exaggerated and fascinating atomic properties. Example includes high susceptibility to electric fields and relatively long life time in comparison to atoms in low-lying states. The tunable interaction between Rydberg atoms have made them even more versatile in simulating quantum many-body systems, e.g. interacting spin-1/2 particles. We will start the thesis by reviewing these properties of Rydberg atoms and explain how they lead to the Rydberg lattice gases that of interest. Following the review of the essential knowledge of Rydberg atoms, we first study the ground states of interacting Rydberg lattice gases in both one-dimension and two-dimensions. The many-body system we are interested in is initially prepared in a Mott-insulator state, with each lattice site containing one atom that is laser coupled to its highly excited Rydberg state. The extremely huge van der Waals interactions between Rydberg atoms at close distance leads to an interesting Rydberg blockade effect. As we shall show, these strong interactions lead to rich phases and critical behaviours in the ground states of the many-body Hamiltonians that describes the systems. The aim of the first three chapters is to analyse these ground states in detail. Having investigated the static properties, we then move on to study the dynamical behaviour of a class of generic spin models which can in principal be realised by Rydberg lattice gases with tunable blockade radius. By deriving an effective master equation, and comparing it to the exact calculation, we will demonstrate how different pure initial states eventually evolve to the same equilibrium state and analysed in detail the time evolution and the steady state.
We discuss techniques to generate long-range interactions in a gas of ground state alkali atoms, by weakly admixing excited Rydberg states with laser light. This provides a tool to engineer strongly correlated phases with reduced decoherence from inelastic collisions and spontaneous emission. As an illustration, we discuss the quantum phases of dressed atoms with dipole-dipole interactions confined in a harmonic potential, as relevant to experiments. We show that residual spontaneous emission from the Rydberg state acts as a heating mechanism, leading to a quantum-classical crossover.