Seminar
Tuesday, 29 May, 2012
Group Seminar MPQ: Many-body physics with Rydberg lattice gases
Tuesday, 29.05.2012 10:00 a.m. (s.t.) in Herbert-Walther-lecture room, MPQ Garching
Igor Lesanovsky, University of Nottingham
During the past years the field of ultra cold atomic physics
has produced exciting insights into the structure and dynamics
of many-body quantum systems. The reason for this success story
is rooted in the versatility offered by ultra cold atoms, such
as the tunability of their interactions and the advanced
techniques that have been developed for their trapping and
coherent manipulation.
At present the majority of ultra cold atoms experiments is
carried out with ground state atoms. Since very recently,
however, there is a growing initiative aiming towards
exploiting the unique properties of atoms in highly excited
states. Those so-called Rydberg atoms are blessed with
remarkable features such as strong and long-ranged interactions
together with comparatively long coherence times.
In this talk I discuss static and dynamic many-body phenomena
that can be explored with Rydberg atoms in low dimensional
lattices. I present analytic solutions for the ground state of
a dense Rydberg lattice gas [1,2] and discuss how spatial
correlations are controlled by experimental parameters such as
the laser detuning and the Rabi-frequency. I furthermore show
that a quenched Rydberg gas relaxes into a steady state in
which spatial correlations emerge spontaneously due to entropic
effects [3,4]. Finally, I show that a one-dimensional Rydberg
lattice gas naturally hosts so-called Fibonacci anyons and
therefore constitutes a platform for the study of exotic forms
of quantum matter [5].
[1] I. Lesanovsky, PRL 106, 025301 (2011)
[2] I. Lesanovsky, PRL 108, 105301 (2012)
[3] C. Ates, J.P. Garrahan and I. Lesanovsky, PRL 108, 110603 (2012)
[4] C. Ates and I. Lesanovsky, arXiv:1202.2012 (2012)
[5] I. Lesanovsky and H. Katsura, arXiv:1204.0903 (2012)