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arXiv:2510.01504 · Physical Review Research

Robust Rydberg facilitation via rapid adiabatic passage

Xinghan Wang, Yupeng Wang, Qiyu Liang

Published Jan 20, 2026• 0 citations

Abstract

Rydberg antiblockade, or facilitation, governs interaction-assisted excitation dynamics that generate a wide variety of collective phenomena and correlated many-body behavior, while also forming the basis of protocols for entangling gates, state transfer, and quantum sensing. Despite its rich physics, experimental realization of facilitation has been fragile because the resonance condition requires precise matching between interaction shifts and laser detuning, making the process highly sensitive to atomic position disorder and parameter fluctuations. To overcome this limitation, we develop a robust implementation of Rydberg facilitation based on rapid adiabatic passage. By adiabatically sweeping the laser detuning across the interaction-shifted resonance, our approach is inherently insensitive to typical experimental imperfections. As a direct demonstration, we show that this adiabatically protected facilitation naturally gives rise to avalanche excitation growth in both one- and two-dimensional arrays. This avalanche process yields high gain with exceptionally low background, making it promising for rare-event detection. More broadly, by completely eliminating disorder sensitivity, our approach transforms Rydberg facilitation from an experimentally elusive regime into a robust mechanism implementable with standard cooling techniques and existing optical tweezer platforms, bridging the gap between theoretical proposals and disorder-free experimental realizations of antiblockade-based quantum control.

DOI: 10.1103/23x7-g2h6

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Rydberg antiblockade, or facilitation, governs interaction-assisted excitation dynamics that generate a wide variety of collective phenomena and correlated many-body behavior, while also forming the basis of protocols for entangling gates, state transfer, and quantum sensing. Despite its rich physics, experimental realization of facilitation has been fragile because the resonance condition requires precise matching between interaction shifts and laser detuning, making the process highly sensitive to atomic position disorder and parameter fluctuations. To overcome this limitation, we develop a robust implementation of Rydberg facilitation based on rapid adiabatic passage. By adiabatically sweeping the laser detuning across the interaction-shifted resonance, our approach is inherently insensitive to typical experimental imperfections. As a direct demonstration, we show that this adiabatically protected facilitation naturally gives rise to avalanche excitation growth in both one- and two-dimensional arrays. This avalanche process yields high gain with exceptionally low background, making it promising for rare-event detection. More broadly, by completely eliminating disorder sensitivity, our approach transforms Rydberg facilitation from an experimentally elusive regime into a robust mechanism implementable with standard cooling techniques and existing optical tweezer platforms, bridging the gap between theoretical proposals and disorder-free experimental realizations of antiblockade-based quantum control.

In an atomic ensemble, quantum information is typically carried as single collective excitations. It is very advantageous if the creation of single excitations is efficient and robust. A Rydberg blockade enables deterministic creation of single excitations via a collective Rabi oscillation by precisely controlling the pulse area, being sensitive to many experimental parameters. In this paper, we implement the adiabatic rapid passage technique to the Rydberg excitation process in a mesoscopic atomic ensemble. We make use of a two-photon excitation scheme with an intermediate state off-resonant and sweep the laser frequency of one excitation laser. We find the chirped scheme preserves internal phases of the collective Rydberg excitation and is more robust against variance of laser intensity and frequency detuning.

We propose a cascaded Rydberg antiblockade (RAB) regime via a Floquet modulation in four fully connected interacting atoms, which establishes a new synthetic dimension, Dicke-state lattice (DSL), in the space of collective spin excitations. By applying a global periodic driving, we synthesize an effective Hamiltonian that enables perfect state transfer across the five-site DSL with multiple programmable pathways from stepwise nearest-neighbor jumps to a single-step transition. This DSL platform further allows us to simulate a dynamic Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, where soft quantum control is employed to achieve topologically inspired full RAB

|0000\rangle \to |1111\rangle

with enhanced robustness against disorder. Moreover, by incorporating the shortcut to adiabaticity technique, we generate high-fidelity entangled twin-Fock and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states on the four atoms within sub-microsecond timescales, outperforming the speed limits of conventional adiabatic protocols. Our work demonstrates a flexible and programmable synthetic dimension for quantum simulation and multipartite entanglement engineering in Rydberg atom arrays, paving the way for the future development of quantum information processing.

The Rydberg blockade mechanism is now routinely considered for entangling qubits encoded in clock states of neutral atoms. Challenges towards implementing entangling gates with high fidelity include errors due to thermal motion of atoms, laser amplitude inhomogeneities, and imperfect Rydberg blockade. We show that adiabatic rapid passage by Rydberg dressing provides a mechanism for implementing two-qubit entangling gates by accumulating phases that are robust to these imperfections. We find that the typical error in implementing a two-qubit gate, such as the controlled phase gate, is dominated by errors in the single-atom light shift, and that this can be easily corrected using adiabatic dressing interleaved with a simple spin echo sequence. This results in a two-qubit M\o{}lmer-S\o{}rensen gate. A gate fidelity $\ensuremath{\sim}0.995$ is achievable with modest experimental parameters and a path to higher fidelities is possible for Rydberg states in atoms with a stronger blockade, longer lifetimes, and larger Rabi frequencies.

High-fidelity and robust quantum gates are essential for quantum information processing, with neutral Rydberg atoms trapped in optical tweezer arrays serving as a versatile platform for the implementation. We propose a rapid adiabatic passage (RAP) scheme for achieving a high-fidelity controlled-

Z

(CZ) gate on a neutral-atom Rydberg platform. Utilizing only global laser dressing, our scheme involves echoing two identical RAP pulses within the Rydberg blockade regime to realize a CZ gate and can be readily extended to a

{\mathrm{C}}^{k}\mathrm{Z}

gate with additional qubits. We predict a CZ gate with fidelity over 0.9995 using alkali-metal atom parameters, and a CCZ gate with fidelity exceeding 0.999. Moreover, the direct utilization of echoing RAP pulses enables the implementation of a four-bit CCCZ gate at fidelity over 0.996 without further optimization. The proposed scheme, remarkably robust to variations in driving fields and realistic decoherence effects, holds promise for future quantum information processing applications.

Resonant laser excitation of multiple Rydberg atoms are prohibited, leading to Rydberg blockade, when the long-range van der Waals interactions are stronger than the laser-atom coupling. Rydberg blockade can be violated, i.e., simultaneous excitation of more than one Rydberg atom, by off-resonant laser excitation, causing an excitation antiblockade. Rydberg antiblockade gives rise to strongly correlated many-body dynamics and spin-orbit coupling and also finds quantum computation applications. Instead of commonly used van der Waals interactions, we investigate antiblockade dynamics of two Rydberg atoms interacting via dipole-dipole exchange interactions. We study typical situations in current Rydberg atom experiments, where different types of dipole-dipole interactions can be achieved by varying Rydberg state couplings. An effective Hamiltonian governing underlying antiblockade dynamics is derived. We illustrate that geometric gates can be realized with the Rydberg antiblockade which is robust against the decay of Rydberg states. Our study may stimulate new experimental and theoretical exploration of quantum optics and strongly interacting many-body dynamics with Rydberg antiblockade driven by dipole-dipole interactions.

Abstract We propose a mechanism of ground-state antiblockade of Rydberg atoms, which is then exploited to prepare two-atom entangled state via three different kinds of pulses. First we use the pulses in the form of sin2 and cos2 functions and obtain a maximally entangled state at an accurate interaction time. Then the method of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is adopted for the entanglement generation, which is immune to the fluctuations of revelent parameters but requires a long time. Finally we capitalize the advantages of the former two methods and employ shortcuts to adiabatic passage (STAP) to generate the maximal entanglement. The strictly numerical simulation reveals that the current scheme is robust against spontaneous emission of atoms due to the virtual excitation of Rydberg states, and all of the above methods favor a high fidelity with the present experimental technology.