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arXiv:2511.13279 · Physical Review A

Spectroscopic signatures of emergent elementary excitations in a kinetically constrained long-range interacting two-dimensional spin system

Tobias Kaltenmark, Chris Nill, Christian Groß, Igor Lesanovsky

cond-mat.quant-gasphysics.atom-phquant-phSubmitted Nov 17, 2025• Announced Nov 18, 2025• 0 citations
v1 · Nov 17, 2025v2 · Mar 13, 2026
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Abstract

Lattice spin models featuring kinetic constraints constitute a paradigmatic setting for the investigation of glassiness and localization phenomena. The intricate dynamical behavior of these systems is a result of the dramatically reduced connectivity between many-body configurations. This truncation of transition pathways often leads to a fragmentation of the Hilbert space, yielding highly collective and therefore often slow dynamics. Moreover, this mechanism supports the formation of characteristic elementary excitations, which we investigate here theoretically in a two-dimensional Rydberg lattice gas. We explore their properties as a function of interaction strength and range, and illustrate how they can be experimentally probed via sideband spectroscopy. Here, we show that the transition rate to certain delocalized superposition states of elementary excitations displays collective many-body enhancement.

DOI
10.1103/cdz9-rxn2
Comments
Code is publicly available via Zenodo under https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17629916

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Abstract We investigate the relaxation dynamics of a Rydberg gas in regimes where coherent processes and dissipation compete. In the strongly dissipative limit, the dynamics is known to be governed by an effective classical rate equation and to exhibit kinetically constrained, glassy relaxation towards a trivial stationary state. This behaviour originates from the Rydberg blockade, which prevents simultaneous excitations within a characteristic blockade radius. However, the fate of kinetic constraints in the weakly dissipative limit remains unexplored in large systems above one dimension. To access large system sizes and two-dimensional geometries, we employ the truncated Wigner approximation, a phase-space method that captures correlated many-body dynamics beyond classical rate equations. To probe the emergence of kinetic constraints on timescales where coherent and dissipative processes are comparable, we analyse the relaxation dynamics starting from two initial states: a fully polarised state and a Néel state, which belongs to a manifold of so-called quantum scars. In both cases, we observe a pronounced slowdown in the relaxation of the magnetisation towards the stationary state and identify transient signatures of quantum kinetically constrained dynamics in one and two dimensions.