Related papers: Griffiths Phase in a Facilitated Rydberg Gas at Lo…
The excitation spread caused by Rydberg facilitation in a gas of laser driven atoms is an interesting model system for studying epidemic dynamics. We derive a mean-field approach to describe this facilitation process in the limits of high…
Understanding and probing phase transitions in non-equilibrium systems is an ongoing challenge in physics. A particular instance are phase transitions that occur between a non-fluctuating absorbing phase, e.g., an extinct population, and…
We develop a theoretical approach for the dynamics of Rydberg excitations in ultracold gases, with a realistically large number of atoms. We rely on the reduction of the single-atom Bloch equations to rate equations, which is possible under…
We demonstrate a non-equilibrium phase transition in a dilute thermal atomic gas. The phase transition, between states of low and high Rydberg occupancy, is induced by resonant dipole-dipole interactions between Rydberg atoms. The gas can…
The physics of highly excited Rydberg atoms is governed by blockade or exclusion interactions that hinder the excitation of atoms in the proximity of a previously excited one. This leads to cooperative effects and a relaxation dynamics…
Cold atomic gases resonantly excited to Rydberg states can exhibit strong optical nonlinearity at the single photon level. We observe that in such samples radiation trapping leads to an additional mechanism for Rydberg excitation.…
Many-body systems relaxing to equilibrium can exhibit complex dynamics even if their steady state is trivial. At low temperatures or high densities their evolution is often dominated by steric hindrances affecting particle motion [1,2,3].…
We present a depletion imaging technique to map out the spatial and temporal dependency of the density distribution of an ultracold gas of Rydberg atoms. Locally resolved absorption depletion, observed through differential ground state…
Whether it be physical, biological or social processes, complex systems exhibit dynamics that are exceedingly difficult to understand or predict from underlying principles. Here we report a striking correspondence between the collective…
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…
The strong interaction between Rydberg atoms can be used to control the strength and character of the interatomic interaction in ultracold gases by weakly dressing the atoms with a Rydberg state. Elaborate theoretical proposals for the…
Strongly-interacting Rydberg atomic ensembles have shown intense collective excitation effects due to the inclusion of single Rydberg excitation shared by multiple atoms in the ensemble. In this paper we investigate a counter-intuitive…
We derive a quantum master equation for an atom coupled to a heat bath represented by a charged particle many-body environment. In Born-Markov approximation, the influence of the plasma environment on the reduced system is described by the…
Recent developments in the study of ultracold Rydberg gases demand an advanced level of experimental sophistication, in which high atomic and optical densities must be combined with excellent control of external fields and sensitive Rydberg…
Rydberg atoms provide a wide range of possibilities to tailor interactions in a quantum gas. Here we report on Rydberg excitation of Bose-Einstein condensed 87Rb atoms. The Rydberg fraction was investigated for various excitation times and…
The excitation dynamics of a laser-driven Rydberg gas exhibits a cooperative effect due to the interatomic Rydberg-Rydberg interaction, but the large many-body system with inhomogeneous Rydberg coupling is hard to exactly solved or…
We explore the non-equilibrium evolution and stationary states of an open many-body system which displays epidemic spreading dynamics in a classical and a quantum regime. Our study is motivated by recent experiments conducted in strongly…
We examine the adiabatic preparation of spatially-ordered Rydberg excitations of atoms in finite one-dimensional lattices by frequency-chirped laser pulses, as realized in a number of recent experiments simulating quantum Ising model. Our…
A statistical analysis of the laser excitation of cold and randomly distributed atoms to Rydberg states is developed. We first demonstrate with a hard ball model that the distribution of energy level shifts in an interacting gas obeys…
Atoms excited into high-lying Rydberg states and under strong dipole-dipole interactions exhibit phenomena associated with highly correlated and complex systems. We perform first principles numerical simulations on the dynamics of such…