Driven-dissipative Rydberg blockade in optical lattices

Abstract

While dissipative Rydberg gases exhibit unique possibilities to tune dissipation and interaction properties, very little is known about the quantum many-body physics of such long-range interacting open quantum systems. We theoretically analyze the steady state of a van der Waals interacting Rydberg gas in an optical lattice based on a variational treatment that also includes long-range correlations necessary to describe the physics of the Rydberg blockade, i.e., the inhibition of neighboring Rydberg excitations by strong interactions. In contrast to the ground state phase diagram, we find that the steady state undergoes a single first order phase transition from a blockaded Rydberg gas to a facilitation phase where the blockade is lifted. The first order line terminates in a critical point when including sufficiently strong dephasing, enabling a highly promising route to study dissipative criticality in these systems. In some regimes, we also find good quantitative agreement with effective short-range models despite the presence of the Rydberg blockade, justifying the wide use of such phenomenological descriptions in the literature.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Exact solution of the infinite-range dissipative transverse-field Ising model
• Emergent Continuous Time Crystal in Dissipative Quantum Spin System without Driving
• Rydberg atomtronic devices
• Controlled dissipation for Rydberg atom experiments
• Tensor-network-based variational Monte Carlo approach to the non-equilibrium steady state of open quantum systems
• Variational approach to open quantum systems with long-range competing interactions