Dynamical crystal creation with polar molecules or Rydberg atoms in optical lattices

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how to dynamically create and control crystalline states in systems of polar molecules or Rydberg atoms in optical lattices through external field manipulation, with potential for experimental realization.

Contribution

It introduces a method to produce and analyze crystalline states via time-dependent external fields and studies their stability and correlations in one-dimensional systems.

Findings

Crystalline states can be generated with high filling fractions.

Crystalline order persists for long times in polar molecules.

Increasing coupling strength disrupts crystalline order, altering correlation decay.

Abstract

We investigate the dynamical formation of crystalline states with systems of polar molecules or Rydberg atoms loaded into a deep optical lattice. External fields in these systems can be used to couple the atoms or molecules between two internal states: one that is weakly interacting and one that exhibits a strong dipole-dipole interaction. By appropriate time variation of the external fields, we show that it is possible to produce crystalline states of the strongly interacting states with high filling fractions chosen via the parameters of the coupling. We study the coherent dynamics of this process in one dimension (1D) using a modified form of the time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) algorithm, and obtain crystalline states for system sizes and parameters corresponding to realistic experimental configurations. For polar molecules these crystalline states will be long-lived, assisting in a characterization of the state via the measurement of correlation functions. We also show that as the coupling strength increases in the model, the crystalline order is broken. This is characterized in 1D by a change in density-density correlation functions, which decay to a constant in the crystalline regime, but show different regions of exponential and algebraic decay for larger coupling strengths.