Ergodicity breaking from Rydberg clusters in a driven-dissipative many-body system

Ding, Dongsheng; Bai, Zhengyang; Liu, Zongkai; Shi, Baosen; Guo, Guangcan; Li, Weibin; Adams, C Stuart

Abstract

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 bed to detect emergent exotic many-body phases and nonergodic dynamics where the strong Rydberg atom interaction competes with and overtakes dissipative effects even at room temperature. Here, we report experimental evidence of a transition from ergodic toward ergodic breaking dynamics in driven-dissipative Rydberg atomic gases. The broken ergodicity is featured by the long-time phase oscillation, which is attributed to the formation of Rydberg excitation clusters in limit cycle phases. The broken symmetry in the limit cycle is a direct manifestation of many-body collective effects, which is verified experimentally by tuning atomic densities. The reported result reveals that Rydberg many-body systems are a promising candidate to probe ergodicity breaking dynamics, such as limit cycles, and enable the benchmark of nonequilibrium phase transition.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 29, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Mar 1, 2024
• Publication Date: 2024-03
• Deposit Date: Jan 29, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 12, 2024
• Journal: Science Advances
• Electronic ISSN: 2375-2548
• Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 9
• Article Number: eadl5893
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adl5893
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/30507079
• Publisher URL: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl5893