Dynamics and equilibration of Rydberg excitations in dissipative atomic ensembles

Abstract

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 two-dimensional lattices. We show that under typical experimental conditions involving slow Rydberg state decay and sizable relaxation of atomic coherences, on the time scale of several microseconds the atomic ensemble approaches a stationary state in which much of the quantum correlations between the atoms have decayed away. The steady state, however, exhibits strong classical correlations of Rydberg excitation probabilities.

References in corpus (7)

• Observation of mesoscopic crystalline structures in a two-dimensional Rydberg gas
• Evidence for coherent collective Rydberg excitation in the strong blockade regime
• Dipole blockade in a cold Rydberg atomic sample
• Rydberg excitation of Bose-Einstein condensates
• Steady-state crystallization of Rydberg excitations in an optically driven lattice gas
• Stimulated adiabatic passage in a dissipative Rydberg superatom
• Entropic enhancement of spatial correlations in a laser-driven Rydberg gas

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Kinetic constraints, hierarchical relaxation and onset of glassiness in strongly interacting and dissipative Rydberg gases
• Binding potentials and interaction gates between microwave-dressed Rydberg atoms
• Spatial correlations of one dimensional driven-dissipative systems of Rydberg atoms
• Coherent versus incoherent excitation dynamics in dissipative many-body Rydberg systems
• Collective excitation of Rydberg-atom ensembles beyond the $\sqrt{N}$ enhancement
• Two-dimensional crystals of Rydberg excitations in a resonantly driven lattice gas
• Dynamical preparation of laser-excited anisotropic Rydberg crystals in 2D optical lattices
• Filtering single atoms from Rydberg blockaded mesoscopic ensembles
• On the adiabatic preparation of spatially-ordered Rydberg excitations of atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice by laser frequency sweeps
• Spatial Patterns of Rydberg Excitations from Logarithmic Pair Interactions
• Modeling Rydberg Gases using Random Sequential Adsorption on Random Graphs