Coherent Excitation Transfer in a Spin Chain of Three Rydberg Atoms

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates coherent excitation transfer in a three-atom Rydberg spin chain, highlighting the significance of long-range interactions and their potential for scalable quantum simulation.

Contribution

It provides experimental evidence of excitation dynamics governed by an XY Hamiltonian with long-range dipole interactions in a Rydberg atom array.

Findings

Revival phenomena due to next neighbor interactions

Long-range dipole coupling scales as 1/R^3

Rydberg arrays are promising for quantum simulation

Abstract

We study coherent excitation hopping in a spin chain realized using highly excited individually addressable Rydberg atoms. The dynamics are fully described in terms of an XY spin Hamiltonian with a long range resonant dipole-dipole coupling that scales as the inverse third power of the lattice spacing, $C_3/R^3$. The experimental data demonstrate the importance of next neighbor interactions which are manifest as revivals in the excitation dynamics. The results suggest that arrays of Rydberg atoms are ideally suited to large scale, high-fidelity quantum simulation of spin dynamics.