Interacting Cold Rydberg Atoms: A Toy Many-Body System

Luís Gustavo Marcassa

J. H. Gurian, Patrick Cheinet, Paul H. Huillery +5 more

Cold Rydberg atoms subject to long-range dipole-dipole interactions represent a particularly interesting system for exploring few-body interactions and probing the transition from 2-body physics to the many-body regime. In this work we report the direct observation of a resonant 4-body Rydberg interaction. We exploit the occurrence of an accidental quasicoincidence of a 2-body and a 4-body resonant Stark-tuned Förster process in cesium to observe a resonant energy transfer requiring the simultaneous interaction of at least four neighboring atoms. These results are relevant for the implementation of quantum gates with Rydberg atoms and for further studies of many-body physics.

Georg A. Raithel

André Luiz de Oliveira, M. Mancini, Vanderlei Salvador Bagnato +1 more

O. Morsch, Igor Lesanovsky

In the last twenty years, Rydberg atoms have become a versatile and much studied system for implementing quantum many-body systems in the framework of quantum computation and quantum simulation. However, even in the absence of coherent evolution Rydberg systems exhibit interesting and non-trivial many-body phenomena such as kinetic constraints and non-equilibrium phase transitions that are relevant in a number of research fields. Here we review our recent work on such systems, where dissipation leads to incoherent dynamics and also to population decay. We show that those two effects, together with the strong interactions between Rydberg atoms, give rise to a number of intriguing phenomena that make cold Rydberg atoms an attractive test-bed for classical many-body processes and quantum generalizations thereof.

Hendrik Weimer