Variational analysis of driven-dissipative Rydberg gases

TL;DR

This paper introduces a variational method to analyze the non-equilibrium steady states of driven-dissipative Rydberg gases, demonstrating its advantages and ability to match experimental results quantitatively.

Contribution

It presents a detailed discussion of a novel variational approach for Rydberg gases and compares it with existing methods, highlighting its effectiveness.

Findings

The variational method accurately explains experimental data.

It offers advantages over traditional hierarchy-based methods.

The approach provides insights into non-equilibrium steady states.

Abstract

We study the non-equilibrium steady state arising from the interplay between coherent and dissipative dynamics in strongly interacting Rydberg gases using a recently introduced variational method [H. Weimer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 040402 (2015)]. We give a detailed discussion of the properties of this novel approach, and we provide a comparison with methods related to the Bogoliubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon hierarchy. We find that the variational approach offers some intrinsic advantages, and we also show that it is able to explain the experimental results obtained in an ultracold Rydberg gas on an unprecedented quantitative level.