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arXiv:2209.00039 · Physical Review Letters

Driven-Dissipative Rydberg Blockade in Optical Lattices

Javad Kazemi, Hendrik Weimer

Published Apr 19, 2023• 10 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.130.163601

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Non-equilibrium quantum dynamics represents an emerging paradigm for condensed matter physics, quantum information science, and statistical mechanics. Strongly interacting Rydberg atoms offer an attractive platform to examine driven-dissipative dynamics of quantum spin models with long-range order. Here, we explore the conditions under which stationary many-body entanglement persists with near-unit fidelity and high scalability. In our approach, coherent many-body dynamics is driven by Rydberg-mediated laser transitions, while atoms at the lattice boundary locally reduce the entropy of the many-body system. Surprisingly, the many-body entanglement is established by continuously evolving a locally dissipative Rydberg system towards the steady state, precisely as with optical pumping. We characterize the dynamics of multipartite entanglement in an one-dimensional lattice by way of quantum uncertainty relations, and demonstrate the long-range behavior of the stationary entanglement with finite-size scaling. Our work opens a route towards dissipative preparation of many-body entanglement with unprecedented scaling behavior.
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We study the appearance of correlated many-body phenomena in an ensemble of atoms driven resonantly into a strongly interacting Rydberg state. The ground state of the Hamiltonian describing the driven system exhibits a second order quantum phase transition. We derive the critical theory for the quantum phase transition and show that it describes the properties of the driven Rydberg system in the saturated regime. We find that the suppression of Rydberg excitations known as blockade phenomena exhibits an algebraic scaling law with a universal exponent.