Ultrafast Many-Body Dynamics in an Ultracold Rydberg-Excited Atomic Mott Insulator

Abstract

We report the observation and control of ultrafast non-equilibrium many-body electron dynamics in Rydberg-excited spatially-ordered ultracold atoms created from a three-dimensional unity-filling atomic Mott insulator. By implementing time-domain Ramsey interferometry with attosecond precision in our Rydberg atomic system, we observe picosecond-scale ultrafast many-body dynamics that is essentially governed by the emergence and evolution of many-body correlations between long-range interacting atoms in an optical lattice. We analyze our observations with different theoretical approaches and find that quantum fluctuations have to be included beyond semi-classical descriptions to describe the observed dynamics. Our Rydberg lattice platform combined with an ultrafast approach, which is robust against environmental noises, opens the door for simulating strongly-correlated electron dynamics by long-range van der Waals interaction and resonant dipole-dipole interaction to the charge-overlapping regime in synthetic ultracold atomic crystals.

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Rydberg superatoms: An artificial quantum system for quantum information processing and quantum optics
• Proposal for simulating quantum spin models with the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction using Rydberg atoms and the construction of asymptotic quantum many-body scar states
• Strong Spin-Motion Coupling in the Ultrafast Dynamics of Rydberg Atoms
• Motional decoherence in ultracold Rydberg atom quantum simulators of spin models
• Order-by-disorder and emergent Kosterlitz-Thouless phase in triangular Rydberg array
• Generation of 480 nm picosecond pulses for ultrafast excitation of Rydberg atoms
• Two-dimensional correlation propagation dynamics with a cluster discrete phase-space method
• Tracking a nonrelativistic charge with an array of Rydberg atoms
• Proposal for realizing quantum-spin systems on a two-dimensional square lattice with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction by Floquet engineering using Rydberg atoms
• Engineering the non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model with skin effects in Rydberg atom arrays
• Optimization of conveyance of quantum particles by moving potential well