Epidemic growth and Griffiths effects on an emergent network of excited atoms

Abstract

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 excitation dynamics of a laser driven ultracold gas of Rydberg atoms and the spreading of diseases, which in turn opens up a highly controllable experimental platform for studying non-equilibrium dynamics on complex networks. We find that the competition between facilitated excitation and spontaneous decay results in a fast growth of the number of excitations that follows a characteristic sub-exponential time dependence which is empirically observed as a key feature of real epidemics. Based on this we develop a quantitative microscopic susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model which links the growth and final excitation density to the dynamics of an emergent heterogeneous network and rare active region effects associated to an extended Griffiths phase. This provides physical insights into the nature of non-equilibrium criticality in driven many-body systems and the mechanisms leading to non-universal power-laws in the dynamics of complex systems.

References in corpus (8)

• Dynamical crystallization in a low-dimensional Rydberg gas
• Griffiths phases on complex networks
• Quantum Griffiths effects and smeared phase transitions in metals: theory and experiment
• Strongly correlated growth of Rydberg aggregates in a vapor cell
• Localization phenomena in interacting Rydberg lattice gases with position disorder
• Critical behavior and Griffiths effects in the disordered contact process
• Non-equilibrium effective field theory for absorbing state phase transitions in driven open quantum spin systems
• Kinetic Monte Carlo modelling of dipole blockade in Rydberg excitation experiment

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Enhanced metrology at the critical point of a many-body Rydberg atomic system
• Universality in driven open quantum matter
• Ergodicity breaking from Rydberg clusters in a driven-dissipative many-body system
• Reaction-limited quantum reaction-diffusion dynamics
• Floquet-Tailored Rydberg Interactions
• Hydrodynamic stabilization of self-organized criticality in a driven Rydberg gas
• Avalanche terahertz photon detection in a Rydberg tweezer array
• Universality and two-body losses: lessons from the effective non-Hermitian dynamics of two particles
• Crossover from the discontinuous to continuous phase transitions in dissipative spin system with collective decay
• Absorbing State Phase Transition with Clifford Circuits
• Modeling and Controlling the Spread of Epidemic with Various Social and Economic Scenarios
• Facilitation Induced Transparency and Single Photon Switch with Dual-Channel Rydberg Interactions
• Continuous phase transition induced by non-Hermiticity in the quantum contact process model
• Dynamical Tipping in a Quantum Limit Cycle