Two-dimensional crystals of Rydberg excitations in a resonantly driven lattice gas

TL;DR

This paper uses semiclassical Monte Carlo simulations to study the formation of spatially ordered Rydberg excitations in a two-dimensional lattice gas, revealing regular structures and sub-Poissonian excitation distributions.

Contribution

It demonstrates the emergence of ordered Rydberg excitation patterns and sub-Poissonian statistics through simulations, extending understanding of many-body effects in lattice gases.

Findings

Formation of regular spatial structures of Rydberg excitations.

Highly sub-Poissonian distribution of Rydberg excitations.

Mandel Q parameter remains nearly independent of system size.

Abstract

The competition between resonant optical excitation of Rydberg states of atoms and their strong, long-range van der Waals interaction results in spatial ordering of Rydberg excitations in a two-dimensional lattice gas, as observed in a recent experiment of Schau{\ss} et al. [Nature 491, 87 (2012)]. Here we use semiclassical Monte Carlo simulations to obtain stationary states for hundreds of atoms in finite-size lattices. We show the formation of regular spatial structures of Rydberg excitations in a system of increasing size, and find highly sub-Poissonian distribution of the number of Rydberg excitations characterized by a large negative value of the Mandel Q parameter which is nearly independent of the system size.