Break-up of Rydberg superatoms via dipole-dipole interactions

TL;DR

This paper studies how dipole-dipole interactions cause Rydberg superatoms, composed of atom clouds with shared excitations, to break apart, revealing insights for exciton transport in Rydberg systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates that dipole-dipole interactions can disassemble Rydberg superatoms, enabling new approaches to exciton transport using atom clouds instead of single sites.

Findings

Dipole-dipole interactions break superatoms by removing excitations.

Dynamics resemble ensemble averages with single-atom entangled motion.

Facilitates experimental realization of adiabatic exciton transport.

Abstract

We investigate resonant dipole-dipole interactions between two "superatoms" of different angular momentum, consisting of two Rydberg-blockaded atom clouds where each of them carries initially a coherently shared single excitation. We demonstrate that the dipole-dipole interaction breaks up the superatoms by removing the excitations from the clouds. The dynamics is akin to an ensemble average over systems where only one atom per cloud participates in entangled motion and excitation transfer. Our findings should thus facilitate the experimental realization of adiabatic exciton transport in Rydberg systems by replacing single sites with atom clouds.