Spatial Patterns of Rydberg Excitations from Logarithmic Pair Interactions

TL;DR

This paper models the spatial arrangements of Rydberg excitations in ultracold atoms using effective particles with logarithmic interactions, enabling analysis of crystal phases and many-body effects in these quantum systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel effective particle model with logarithmic pair potentials to study Rydberg excitation patterns and phases.

Findings

Effective particle model accurately reproduces experimental excitation patterns.

Systematic analysis of N-body contributions to Rydberg crystal phases.

Simplified approach enables exploration of many-body effects in Rydberg systems.

Abstract

The collective excitations in ensembles of dissipative, laser driven ultracold atoms exhibit crystal-like patterns, a many-body effect of the Rydberg blockade mechanism. These crystalline structure are revealed in experiment from a post-selection of configurations with fixed numbers of excitations. Here, we show that these sub-ensemble can be well represented by ensembles of effective particles that interact via logarithmic pair potentials. This allows one to study the emergent patterns with a small number of effective particles to determine the phases of Rydberg crystals and to systematically study contributions from $N$-body terms.