Rydberg Composites

TL;DR

The paper introduces Rydberg Composites, a new class of matter where a Rydberg atom interacts with a dense environment of ground state atoms, revealing diverse electronic states from localized to chaotic.

Contribution

It provides a systematic theoretical framework for understanding Rydberg Composites, exploring their spectral properties and transition from localized to chaotic states depending on atom arrangements.

Findings

Characterized the spectrum and chaos in Rydberg Composites.

Identified regimes from localized to delocalized and chaotic states.

Analyzed the rich band structure in 2D monolayer composites.

Abstract

We introduce the Rydberg Composite, a new class of Rydberg matter where a single Rydberg atom is interfaced with a dense environment of neutral ground state atoms. The properties of the Composite depend on both the Rydberg excitation, which provides the gross energetic and spatial scales, and on the distribution of ground state atoms within the volume of the Rydberg wave function, which sculpt the electronic states. The latter range from the "trilobites", for small numbers of scatterers, to delocalized and chaotic eigenstates for disordered scatterer arrays, culminating in the dense scatterer limit in symmetry-dominated wave functions which promise good control in future experiments. We characterize these scenarios with different theoretical methods, enabling us to obtain scaling behavior for the regular spectrum and measures of chaos and delocalization in the disordered regime. Thus, we obtain a systematic description of the Composite states. The 2D monolayer Composite possesses the richest spectrum with an intricate band structure in the limit of homogeneous scatterers.