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arXiv:1202.2012 · Physical Review A

Entropic enhancement of spatial correlations in a laser-driven Rydberg gas

Cenap Ates, Igor Lesanovsky

Published Jul 11, 2012• 45 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Laser-driven Rydberg gases are many-body quantum systems that exhibit a pronounced collective excitation behavior due to the strong interaction between atoms in high-lying electronic states. Atoms located within a so-called blockade volume share a single Rydberg excitation, which is dynamically created and annihilated. For sufficiently long times, this driven system approaches a steady state, which lends its properties from a maximum entropy state of a Tonks gas. Using this connection, we show that spatial correlations between Rydberg atoms are controlled by the number of atoms contained within a blockade volume. For a small number, the system favors a disordered arrangement of Rydberg atoms, whereas in the opposite limit, Rydberg atoms tend to arrange in an increasingly ordered configuration. We argue that this is an entropic effect which is observable in current experiments. Our work demonstrates how ordered structures can spontaneously emerge in a strongly interacting, closed many-body system out of equilibrium.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.86.013408

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Laser-driven Rydberg gases are many-body quantum systems that exhibit a pronounced collective excitation behavior due to the strong interaction between atoms in high-lying electronic states. Atoms located within a so-called blockade volume share a single Rydberg excitation, which is dynamically created and annihilated. For sufficiently long times, this driven system approaches a steady state, which lends its properties from a maximum entropy state of a Tonks gas. Using this connection, we show that spatial correlations between Rydberg atoms are controlled by the number of atoms contained within a blockade volume. For a small number, the system favors a disordered arrangement of Rydberg atoms, whereas in the opposite limit, Rydberg atoms tend to arrange in an increasingly ordered configuration. We argue that this is an entropic effect which is observable in current experiments. Our work demonstrates how ordered structures can spontaneously emerge in a strongly interacting, closed many-body system out of equilibrium.
We show that the dynamics of a laser driven Rydberg gas in the limit of strong dephasing is described by a master equation with manifest kinetic constraints. The equilibrium state of the system is uncorrelated but the constraints in the dynamics lead to spatially correlated collective relaxation reminiscent of glasses. We study and quantify the evolution towards equilibrium in one and two dimensions, and analyze how the degree of glassiness and the relaxation time are controlled by the interaction strength between Rydberg atoms. We also find that spontaneous decay of Rydberg excitations leads to an interruption of glassy relaxation that takes the system to a highly correlated nonequilibrium stationary state. The results presented here, which are in principle also applicable to other systems such as polar molecules and atoms with large magnetic dipole moments, show that the collective behavior of cold atomic and molecular ensembles can be similar to that found in soft condensed-matter systems.
While dissipative Rydberg gases exhibit unique possibilities to tune dissipation and interaction properties, very little is known about the quantum many-body physics of such long-range interacting open quantum systems. We theoretically analyze the steady state of a van der Waals interacting Rydberg gas in an optical lattice based on a variational treatment that also includes long-range correlations necessary to describe the physics of the Rydberg blockade, i.e., the inhibition of neighboring Rydberg excitations by strong interactions. In contrast to the ground state phase diagram, we find that the steady state undergoes a single first order phase transition from a blockaded Rydberg gas to a facilitation phase where the blockade is lifted. The first order line terminates in a critical point when including sufficiently strong dephasing, enabling a highly promising route to study dissipative criticality in these systems. In some regimes, we also find good quantitative agreement of the phase boundaries with previously employed short-range models, however, with the actual steady states exhibiting strikingly different behavior.
The dynamics of a cloud of ultracold two-level atoms is studied at off-resonant laser driving to a Rydberg state. We find that resonant excitation channels lead to strongly peaked spatial correlations associated with the buildup of asymmetric excitation structures. These aggregates can extend over the entire ensemble volume, but are in general not localized relative to the system boundaries. The characteristic distances between neighboring excitations depend on the laser detuning and on the interaction potential. These properties lead to characteristic features in the spatial excitation density, the Mandel QQQ parameter, and the total number of excitations. As an application an implementation of the three-atom cswap or Fredkin gate with Rydberg atoms is discussed. The gate not only exploits the Rydberg blockade, but also utilizes the special features of an asymmetric geometric arrangement of the three atoms. We show that continuous-wave off-resonant laser driving is sufficient to create the required spatial arrangement of atoms out of a homogeneous cloud.
Crystalline structures of highly excited Rydberg atoms can be a model for dilute metallic solids with tunable parameters, and provide access to the regime of strongly coupled systems. In practice, crystal creation is made difficult by the 'Rydberg blockade', where one atom in the Rydberg state shifts the energy levels of its neighbours out of resonance with the excitation laser. In our experiment, we can spatially detect Rydberg atoms by a combination of field-ionization, and subsequent acceleration of the remaining ions onto a multi-channel plate. In this way, we were able to determine the blockade radius from measuring second-order correlations. We have also made small ordered Rydberg structures by optically imprinting local excitations in a disordered atomic gas using a spatial light modulator. With this diffractive optical element it is possible to control the intensity of light in the far ¿eld and create almost any desired intensity pattern. We found that a Rydberg system with a dissipative mechanism can be mapped onto a set of rate equations that describe a wireless computer network. In these networks neighbouring transmitters have a similar blockade effect on each other. For the Rydberg system, we used mathematical tools developed for wireless networks, and applied this to optically imprinted square lattices.
We report the sudden and spontaneous evolution of an initially correlated gas of repulsively interacting Rydberg atoms to an ultracold plasma. Under continuous laser coupling we create a Rydberg ensemble in the strong blockade regime, which at longer times undergoes an ionization avalanche. By combining optical imaging and ion detection, we access the full information on the dynamical evolution of the system, including the rapid increase in the number of ions and a sudden depletion of the Rydberg and ground state densities. Rydberg-Rydberg interactions are observed to strongly affect the dynamics of plasma formation. Using a coupled rate-equation model to describe our data, we extract the average energy of electrons trapped in the plasma, and an effective cross section for ionizing collisions between Rydberg atoms and atoms in low-lying states. Our results suggest that the initial correlations of the Rydberg ensemble should persist through the avalanche. This would provide the means to overcome disorder-induced heating, and offer a route to enter new strongly coupled regimes.
The collective excitations in ensembles of dissipative, laser driven ultracold atoms exhibit crystal-like patterns, a many-body effect of the Rydberg blockade mechanism. These crystalline structures are revealed in an experiment from a postselection of configurations with fixed numbers of excitations. Here, we show that these subensembles can be well represented by ensembles of effective particles that interact via logarithmic pair potentials. This allows one to study the emergent patterns with a small number of effective particles to determine the phases of Rydberg crystals and to systematically study contributions from N-body terms.