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arXiv:1603.00828 · New Journal of Physics

Non-equilibrium fluctuations and metastability arising from non-additive interactions in dissipative multi-component Rydberg gases

Ricardo Gutiérrez, Juan P. Garrahan, Igor Lesanovsky

Published Sep 29, 2016• 4 citations
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Abstract

We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of dissipative gases of atoms excited to two or more high-lying Rydberg states. This situation bears interesting similarities to classical binary (in general p -ary) mixtures of particles. The effective forces between the components are determined by the inter-level and intra-level interactions of Rydberg atoms. These systems permit to explore new parameter regimes which are physically inaccessible in a classical setting, for example one in which the mixtures exhibit non-additive interactions. In this situation the out-of-equilibrium evolution is characterized by the formation of metastable domains that reach partial equilibration long before the attainment of stationarity. In experimental settings with mesoscopic sizes, this collective behavior may in fact take the appearance of dynamic symmetry breaking.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/18/9/093054

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We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of dissipative gases of atoms excited to two or more high-lying Rydberg states. This situation bears interesting similarities to classical binary (in general p -ary) mixtures of particles. The effective forces between the components are determined by the inter-level and intra-level interactions of Rydberg atoms. These systems permit to explore new parameter regimes which are physically inaccessible in a classical setting, for example one in which the mixtures exhibit non-additive interactions. In this situation the out-of-equilibrium evolution is characterized by the formation of metastable domains that reach partial equilibration long before the attainment of stationarity. In experimental settings with mesoscopic sizes, this collective behavior may in fact take the appearance of dynamic symmetry breaking.
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Dense Rydberg gases are out-of-equilibrium systems where strong density-density interactions give rise to effective kinetic constraints. They cause dynamic arrest associated with highly constrained many-body configurations, leading to slow relaxation and glassy behavior. Multicomponent Rydberg gases feature additional long-range interactions such as excitation exchange. These are analogous to particle swaps used to artificially accelerate relaxation in simulations of atomistic models of classical glass formers. In Rydberg gases, however, swaps are real physical processes, which provide dynamical shortcuts to relaxation. They permit the accelerated approach to stationarity in experiment and at the same time have an impact on the nonequilibrium stationary state. In particular, their interplay with radiative decay processes amplifies irreversibility of the dynamics, an effect which we quantify via the entropy production at stationarity. Our work highlights an intriguing analogy between real dynamical processes in Rydberg gases and artificial dynamics underlying advanced Monte Carlo methods. Moreover, it delivers a quantitative characterization of the dramatic effect swaps have on the structure and dynamics of their stationary state.
We investigate the out-of-equilibrium behavior of a dissipative gas of Rydberg atoms that features a dynamical transition between two stationary states characterized by different excitation densities. We determine the structure and properties of the phase diagram and identify the universality class of the transition, both for the statics and the dynamics. We show that the proper dynamical order parameter is in fact not the excitation density and find evidence that the dynamical transition is in the "model A" universality class; i.e., it features a nontrivial Z2 symmetry and a dynamics with nonconserved order parameter. This sheds light on some relevant and observable aspects of dynamical transitions in Rydberg gases. In particular it permits a quantitative understanding of a recent experiment [C. Carr, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 113901 (2013)] which observed bistable behavior as well as power-law scaling of the relaxation time. The latter emerges not due to critical slowing down in the vicinity of a second order transition, but from the nonequilibrium dynamics near a so-called spinodal line.
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We simulate the dissipative dynamics of a mesoscopic system of long-range interacting particles which can be mapped into non-Hermitian spin models with a PT\mathcal{PT}PT symmetry. We find rich PT\mathcal{PT}PT phase diagrams with PT\mathcal{PT}PT-symmetric and PT\mathcal{PT}PT-broken phases. The dynamical regimes can be further enriched by modulating tunable parameters of the system. We outline how the PT\mathcal{PT}PT symmetries of such systems may be probed by studying their dynamics. We note that systems of Rydberg atoms and systems of Rydberg ions with strong dipolar interactions are particularly well suited for such studies. We present a viable proposal for implementing non-Hermitian physics with PT\mathcal{PT}PT symmetry in Rydberg systems. We show that for realistic parameters, long-range interactions allow the emergence of new PT\mathcal{PT}PT-symmetric regions, generating new PT\mathcal{PT}PT phase transitions. In addition, such PT\mathcal{PT}PT-symmetry phase transitions are found by changing the configurations of the Rydberg atoms. We propose a postselection scheme on an ensemble of Rydberg ions described by an effective three-level system. Detecting the population dynamics, the system shows an oscillatory behavior in the PT\mathcal{PT}PT-unbroken phase and a stationary population for long times in the PT\mathcal{PT}PT-broken phase.