Related papers: Cooperative non-equilibrium phase transition in a …
The identification of tipping points is essential for prediction of collapses or other sudden changes in complex systems. Applications include studies of ecology, thermodynamics, climatology, and epidemiology. However, detecting early signs…
We investigate resonant dipole-dipole interactions between two "superatoms" of different angular momentum, consisting of two Rydberg-blockaded atom clouds where each of them carries initially a coherently shared single excitation. We…
We discuss techniques to generate long-range interactions in a gas of groundstate alkali atoms, by weakly admixing excited Rydberg states with laser light. This provides a tool to engineer strongly correlated phases with reduced decoherence…
We study resonant optical excitations of strongly-interacting Rydberg states of atoms in the presence of relaxations. We employ the quantum stochastic (Monte Carlo) wavefunctions to simulate the dissipative dynamics of tens of atoms in…
It is challenging to probe ergodicity breaking trends of a quantum many-body system when dissipation inevitably damages quantum coherence originated from coherent coupling and dispersive two-body interactions. Rydberg atoms provide a test…
A static electric field of a few V/cm shifts the energy levels of ultracold Rydberg atoms in a magneto-optical trap. For a given principle quantum number, most of the energy levels are nearly degenerate at zero field and fan out with…
We investigate dispersive optical nonlinearities that arise from Rydberg excitation blockade in cold Rydberg gases. We consider a two-photon transition scheme and study the non-linear response to a weak optical probe in presence of a strong…
Strong dipole-dipole interactions between atoms in high-lying Rydberg states can suppress multiple Rydberg excitations within a micron-sized trapping volume and yield sizable Rydberg level shifts at larger distances. Ensembles of atoms in…
We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of dissipative gases of atoms excited to two or more high-lying Rydberg states. This situation bears interesting similarities to classical binary (in general $p$-ary) mixtures of particles. The…
A three-level atomic medium can be made transparent to a resonant probe field in the presence of a strong control field acting on an adjacent atomic transition to a long-lived state, which can be represented by a highly excited Rydberg…
Prethermalization occurs as an important phase in the dynamics of many-body systems when strong coupling drives a quasi-equilibrium in a subspace separated from the thermodynamic equilibrium by the restriction of a gap in energy or other…
A novel supersolid phase is predicted for an ensemble of Rydberg atoms in the dipole-blockade regime, interacting via a repulsive dipolar potential "softened" at short distances. Using exact numerical techniques, we study the low…
By coupling a probe transition to a Rydberg state using electro-magnetically induced transparency (EIT) we map the strong dipole-dipole interactions onto an optical field. We characterize the resulting cooperative optical non-linearity as a…
We investigate the dipole mediated transport of Rydberg impurities through an ultracold gas of atoms excited to an auxiliary Rydberg state. In one experiment we continuously probe the system by coupling the auxiliary Rydberg state to a…
Dipole-dipole interactions between helium atoms in Rydberg-Stark states with principal quantum number $n=53$ and approximately linear Stark energy shifts, resulting from induced electric dipole moments of approximately 7900 D, have been…
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…
Dissipative light-matter systems can display emergent collective behavior. Here, we report a $\mathbb{Z}_2$-symmetry-breaking phase transition in a system of multi-level $^{87}$Rb atoms strongly coupled to a weakly driven two-mode optical…
Optical non-reciprocity is a fundamental phenomenon in photonics. It is crucial for developing devices that rely on directional signal control, such as optical isolators and circulators. However, most research in this field has focused on…
A class of systems exists in which dissipation, external drive and interactions compete and give rise to non equilibrium phases that would not exist without the drive. There, phase transitions could occur without the breaking of any…
We use a density matrix formalism to study the equilibrium phases and non-equilibrium dynamics of a system of dissipative Rydberg atoms in an optical lattice within mean-field theory. We provide equations for the fixed points of the density…