Facilitation dynamics and localization phenomena in Rydberg lattice gases with position disorder

Marcuzzi, Matteo; Min�?, Ji?�; Barredo, Daniel; L�s�leuc, Sylvain de; Labuhn, Hening; Lahaye, Thierry; Browaeys, Antoine; Levi, Emanuele; Lesanovsky, Igor

Abstract

We explore the dynamics of Rydberg excitations in an optical tweezer array under anti-blockade (or facilitation) conditions. Due to the finite temperature the atomic positions are randomly spread, an effect that leads to quenched correlated disorder in the interatomic interaction strengths. This drastically affects the facilitation dynamics as we demonstrate experimentally on the elementary example of two atoms. To shed light on the role of disorder in a many-body setting we show that here the dynamics is governed by an Anderson-Fock model, i.e. an Anderson model formulated on a lattice with sites corresponding to many-body Fock states. We first consider a one-dimensional atom chain in a limit which is described by a one-dimensional Anderson-Fock model with disorder on every other site, featuring both localized and delocalized states. We then illustrate the effect of disorder experimentally in a situation in which the system maps on a two-dimensional Anderson-Fock model on a trimmed square lattice. We observe a clear suppression of excitation propagation which we ascribe to the localization of the many-body wavefunctions in Hilbert space.

Citation

Marcuzzi, M., Minář, J., Barredo, D., Léséleuc, S. D., Labuhn, H., Lahaye, T., …Lesanovsky, I. (2017). Facilitation dynamics and localization phenomena in Rydberg lattice gases with position disorder. Physical Review Letters, 118(6-10), Article 063606. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.063606

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 12, 2017
• Publication Date: Feb 10, 2017
• Deposit Date: Mar 14, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 14, 2017
• Journal: Physical Review Letters
• Print ISSN: 0031-9007
• Electronic ISSN: 1079-7114
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 118
• Issue: 6-10
• Article Number: 063606
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.063606
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/846504
• Publisher URL: http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.063606
• Additional Information: ©2017 American Physical Society
• Contract Date: Mar 14, 2017