Dissipation-sensitive multi-photon excitations of strongly interacting Rydberg atoms

TL;DR

This paper explores how dissipation influences multi-photon excitation and steady states in strongly interacting Rydberg atoms, revealing multi-stability and complex dynamics due to the interplay of nonlinearity and dissipation.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical comparison of two excitation schemes showing dissipation-induced multi-stability in Rydberg atom systems.

Findings

Multiple non-equilibrium steady states due to strong interactions.

Existence of multi-stable steady states influenced by dissipation.

Different dynamical features in excitation schemes with the same initial conditions.

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the effect of dissipation on multi-photon excitation of Rydberg atoms. The steady states and the dynamics are compared via two types of four-level excitation schemes with different dissipative paths of spontaneous emission. We find that in the case of strong Rydberg-Rydberg interaction, the schemes will settle in several different non-equilibrium steady states. The interesting aspect is that there exists the multi-stable steady states, which reveals the competition between interaction-induced nonlinearity and dissipation caused by spontaneous emission. A numerical simulation on the Rydberg population dynamics in the bistable region exhibits different features existing in the two schemes even with the same initial conditions, which accounts for the influence of the dissipation on the dynamics.