# Controlling excitation avalanches in driven Rydberg gases

## TL;DR

This paper proposes a control mechanism for avalanche dynamics in driven Rydberg gases, enabling exploration of self-organized criticality and related phenomena in cold atom systems.

## Contribution

It introduces a time-dependent drive amplitude to control avalanche behavior, expanding the understanding of SOC in Rydberg ensembles.

## Key findings

- Control over avalanche regimes achieved via drive modulation
- Demonstrated dependence of dynamics on external scales and dimensionality
- Potential for exploring extended SOC phenomenology in cold atom systems

## Abstract

Recent experiments with strongly interacting, driven Rydberg ensembles have introduced a promising setup for the study of self-organized criticality (SOC) in cold atom systems. Based on this setup, we theoretically propose a control mechanism for the paradigmatic avalanche dynamics of SOC in terms of a time-dependent drive amplitude. This gives access to a variety of avalanche dominated, self-organization scenarios, prominently including self-organized criticality, as well as sub- and supercritical dynamics. We analyze the dependence of the dynamics on external scales and spatial dimensionality. It demonstrates the potential of driven Rydberg systems as a playground for the exploration of an extended SOC phenomenology and their relation to other common scenarios of SOC, such as e.g. in neural networks and on graphs.