Quantum many-body physics with strongly interacting Rydberg atoms

Jovica Stanojevic, Robin C ot 'e

Antoine Browaeys

Zhengyang Bai, Cheng Chen, Fan Yang +1 more

Rydberg atoms, characterized by their strong and long-range dipole-dipole interactions, provide a versatile platform for exploring intriguing collective and many-body effects. Recently, the experimental realization of these effects in dense ensembles and reconfigurable atomic arrays has attracted significant interest, particularly for applications in quantum simulations and non-equilibrium physics. This review focuses on such recent development, discussing the theoretical foundations of the interactions between Rydberg atoms and the ensuing many-body physics, while providing a critical survey of experimental techniques for their precise manipulation and observation. We further discuss recent breakthroughs in leveraging Rydberg collective effects to probe novel many-body phases and non-equilibrium dynamics of these systems. By synthesizing theoretical insights with experimental milestones, we provide a comprehensive perspective on this rapidly evolving field and its transformative potential for future quantum technologies.

Przemysław Bienias

Paul H. Huillery

During this thesis, the Physics of interacting systems has been investigated experimentally using Cold Rydberg gases. Rydberg atoms are very excited atoms and have the particularity to interact strongly together through long-range electrostatic interaction. A first highlight of the thesis is a direct experimental observation of a 4-body process. This process consists in internal exchanges of excitations between 4 Rydberg atoms due to their mutual interactions. In addition to its experimental observation, the process has been succefully described theoretically at a quantum level. A second highlight of this thesis has concerns the study of the laser excitation of strongly interacting Rydberg gases. In this regime, many-body quantum correlations play a central role leading to fascinating many-body behavior. In addition to fundamental interests, such systems could be used to implement quantum simulator or non-classical light sources. The system has been investigated during this thesis through the counting statistics of the Rydberg excitation. A highly sub-poisonian, i.e correlated, statistics has been observed in the regim of strong interactions proving the many-body nature of the system. A third highlight of this thesis is the development of an original theoretical model to describe the laser excitation of strongly interacting Rydberg gases. Using the so-called Dicke collective states, it has been possible to catch several interesting features of this many-body problem.

Rhine Samajdar, Mikhail D. Lukin, Valentin Walther

Programmable arrays of neutral Rydberg atoms are one of the leading platforms today for scalable quantum simulation and computation. In these systems, the dipole-dipole interactions between the individual atoms, or qubits, typically result in binary -- i.e., two-body -- couplings. In this work, we develop an experimentally accessible scheme for engineering three-body interactions in Rydberg lattices. Such strong three-body couplings can fundamentally modify the underlying physics compared to systems with only two-body interactions: we demonstrate this, in particular, by systematically investigating the effective many-body Hamiltonian and its emergent quantum phases. This capability paves the way for the quantum simulation of a broader class of correlated models of condensed matter and high-energy physics.