Many-body Rabi oscillations of Rydberg excitation in small mesoscopic samples

TL;DR

This paper explores how strong interactions in small ultracold Rydberg atom samples lead to collective excitation phenomena like many-body Rabi oscillations, spatial correlations, and excitation fluctuations, analyzed through numerical solutions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical study of collective Rydberg excitation dynamics, highlighting the role of interactions and correlations in mesoscopic systems.

Findings

Observation of many-body Rabi oscillations

Identification of spatial correlations between excited atoms

Analysis of fluctuations in the number of excited atoms

Abstract

We investigate the collective aspects of Rydberg excitation in ultracold mesoscopic systems. Strong interactions between Rydberg atoms influence the excitation process and impose correlations between excited atoms. The manifestations of the collective behavior of Rydberg excitation are the many-body Rabi oscillations, spatial correlations between atoms as well as the fluctuations of the number of excited atoms. We study these phenomena in detail by numerically solving the many-body Schr\"edinger equation.