Abstract Strongly Rydberg-blockaded two-level atoms form a Rydberg superatom which is excited only to a collective symmetrical Dicke state. However, emerging often in the alkali-earth atoms, spontaneous decay from the Rydberg state to an additional pooling state renders the ensemble no longer a closed superatom. Herein we present a computationally efficient model to characterize the interaction between a fully Rydberg-blockaded ensemble of N Λ-type three-level atoms and a strong probe light field in a coherent state. The model enables us to achieve a decomposition of the coupled dynamics in the strong field limit, which significantly reduces the complexity of computing the N -body system evolution and paves the way for practical analysis in experiments. A quasi-steady-state power spectrum with multiple sidebands is found in the scattered field. The relative heights of the sidebands show a time-dependence determined by the atomic relaxation, which illuminates potential applications of using the system in information transfer of quantum networks. With negligible dissipative flipping to the unsymmetrical states, the atomic relaxation time, indicating a linearly increasing pooling state fraction, is derived analytically as a function of the number of atoms.
Abstract Strongly Rydberg-blockaded two-level atoms form a Rydberg superatom which is excited only to a collective symmetrical Dicke state. However, emerging often in the alkali-earth atoms, spontaneous decay from the Rydberg state to an additional pooling state renders the ensemble no longer a closed superatom. Herein we present a computationally efficient model to characterize the interaction between a fully Rydberg-blockaded ensemble of N Λ-type three-level atoms and a strong probe light field in a coherent state. The model enables us to achieve a decomposition of the coupled dynamics in the strong field limit, which significantly reduces the complexity of computing the N -body system evolution and paves the way for practical analysis in experiments. A quasi-steady-state power spectrum with multiple sidebands is found in the scattered field. The relative heights of the sidebands show a time-dependence determined by the atomic relaxation, which illuminates potential applications of using the system in information transfer of quantum networks. With negligible dissipative flipping to the unsymmetrical states, the atomic relaxation time, indicating a linearly increasing pooling state fraction, is derived analytically as a function of the number of atoms.
Owing to the unique physical characteristics of Rydberg atoms, which play an important role in quantum information and quantum computation, the theoretical and applied research of Rydberg atoms have become the hot spots of scientific research in recent years. With the large polarizability of Rydberg atoms, even a small electric field could cause a considerable electric dipole moment, resulting in a strong dipole-dipole interaction between Rydberg atoms. The multiple excitations of the Rydberg states are strongly inhibited because of the strong dipole interaction between atoms within a mesoscopic interaction (blockade) region. We call this phenomenon the dipole blockade effect. The dipole blockade effect makes it possible to build single-photon quantum devices, implement quantum gates, generate quantum entanglement, and simulate many-body quantum problems, etc. A Rydberg atomic ensemble in the same blockade region can be regarded as a superatom. In the same way, if these atoms trapped in two optical dipole traps, each sub-ensemble can be considered as a sub-superatom which is closely related to the superatom. According to the fact that two Rydberg sub-superatoms can be strongly correlated due to sharing no more than one excited Rydberg atom, we study correlated collective excitation and quantum entanglement between two Rydberg sub-superatoms in a steady state. With the superatom model, the problem of exponentially increasing system size with the number of atoms can be circumvented to a certain extent in studying many-body physics. By solving the two-body Lindblad’s master equation accurately, we obtain the analytical expressions for the collective excitation probabilities of the two sub-superatoms, and the concurrence measuring the bipartite entanglement between them. Our results show that they are all sensitive to the number of atoms in each Rydberg superatom: the bigger (including more atoms) the Rydberg superatom, the higher the collective Rydberg excitation probability is. And that the maximally entangled state can only be obtained with two equal-sized Rydberg superatoms. When this condition is fulfilled, the mesoscopic entanglement can be generated by adding the number of atoms in each Rydberg superatom. This may provide an attractive platform for studying the quantum-classical correspondence and have potential promising applications in quantum information processing.
Owing to the long lifetime of Rydberg atom, easy to operate and easy to control the interaction between Rydberg atoms, Rydberg atom has attracted considerable attention in quantum information and quantum optics fields. Specially, the anti-blockade effect, as a physical resource, can be used to implement various tasks in quantum information processing. Based on the rigid dipole blockade, an ensemble of two-level Rydberg atoms trapped in three magneto-optical traps can be regarded as a superatom. Based on the superatom model, the in-phase and anti-phase dynamics of the three-body Rydberg superatoms are studied by adjusting the numbers of atoms, and the W state and two kinds of maximal entangled states are generated simultaneously. Our work has great potential applications in coherent manipulation and quantum information processing.The numerical simulations are performed based on the superatom model and thereby the formidable obstacle that the Hilbert space dimension grows exponentially with the particle number increasing can be completely removed. As a result, the quantum control and quantum entanglement can be achieved from the single-quanta level to the mesoscopic level.
We present a theory of electromagnetically induced transparency in a cold ensemble of strongly interacting Rydberg atoms. Long-range interactions between the atoms constrain the medium to behave as a collection of superatoms, each comprising a blockade volume that can accommodate at most one Rydberg excitation. The propagation of a probe field is affected by its two-photon correlations within the blockade distance, which are strongly damped due to low saturation threshold of the superatoms. Our model is computationally very efficient and is in quantitative agreement with the results of the recent experiment of Pritchard et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 193603 (2010)].
The W state, as a robust multipartite entangled state, plays an important role in quantum information processing, quantum network construction and quantum computing. In this paper, a three-level ladder-type Rydberg atomic system is placed into a Rydberg blocking sphere to form a superatom. Each superatom has many collective states including just one Rydberg excitation constrained by the Rydberg blockade effect. In the weak cavity field limit, at most one atom can be pumped into excited state, then we can describe the superatom by using a three-level ladder-type system. Afterwards we encode quantum information about the effective energy levels of Rydberg superatoms and propose a fast scheme for preparing the Rydberg superatom W state based on the superadiabatic iterative technique and quantum Zeno dynamics.This scheme can be achieved in only one step by controlling the laser pulses. In this scheme, the superatoms are trapped in spatially separated cavities connected by optical fibers, thereby greatly improving the feasibility of experimental manipulation. A remarkable feature is that it does not need to accurately control experimental parameters and interaction time. Meanwhile, the form of counterdiabatic Hamiltonian is the same as that of the effective Hamiltonian. Through numerical simulations, the fidelity of this scheme can reach 99.94%. Even considering decoherence effects, including atomic spontaneous emission and photon leakage, the fidelity can still exceed 97.5%, thereby further demonstrating the strong robustness of the solution. In addition, the Rabi frequency can be characterized as a linear superposition of Gaussian functions, and this representation significantly alleviates the complexity encountered in practical experiments. Futhermore, we also analyze the influence of parameter fluctuations on the fidelity, and the results show that this scheme is robust against parameter fluctuations. Finally, the present scheme is extended to the case of N Rydberg superatoms, which shows the scalability of our scheme.
Based on the dipole blockade effect and with the aid of the superatom (SA) model, we propose a scheme to investigate the correlated evolution of two Rydberg sub-superatoms (SSAs), formed by two spatially separated atomic Rydberg sub-ensembles but in the same blockade region. Starting from the pure separable states, we investigate the in-phase or anti-phase correlated dynamics and explore how two Rydberg SSAs entangle with each other mediated by a single Rydberg excitation. Starting from the entangled states, we discuss the robustness of the system against decoherence induced by the dephasing rate. Our results show that both the correlated evolution of two Rydberg SSAs and their collective-state entanglement are usually sensitive to the number of each Rydberg SSA. This allows us to coherently manipulate the Rydberg ensemble over long distances from the single-quantum level to the mesoscopic level by changing the number of atoms. Furthermore, the method for dividing an SA into two SSAs and obtaining their spin operators without any approximation can be readily generalized to the case of many SSAs. It may have potential promising applications in quantum information processing and provide an attractive platform to study the quantum-classical correspondence, many-body physics and so on.
Classical simulation of quantum systems plays an important role in the study of many-body phenomena and in the benchmarking and verification of quantum technologies. Exact simulation is often limited to small systems because the dimension of the Hilbert space increases exponentially with the size of the system. For systems that possess a high degree of symmetry, however, classical simulation can reach much larger sizes. Here we consider an ensemble of strongly interacting atoms with permutation symmetry, enabling the computation of certain collective observables for hundreds of atoms at arbitrarily long evolution times. The system is realized by an ensemble of three-level atoms, where one of the levels corresponds to a highly excited Rydberg state. In the limit of all-to-all Rydberg blockade, the Hamiltonian is invariant under permutation of the atoms. Using techniques from representation theory, we construct a block-diagonal form of the Hamiltonian, where the size of the largest block increases only linearly with the system size. We apply this formalism to derive efficient pulse sequences to prepare arbitrary permutation-invariant quantum states. Moreover, we study the quantum dynamics following a quench, uncovering a parameter regime in which the system thermalizes slowly and exhibits pronounced revivals. Our results create opportunities for the experimental and theoretical study of large interacting and nonintegrable quantum systems. Published by the American Physical Society 2024