Melting a Rydberg ice to a topological spin liquid with cavity vacuum fluctuation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the transformation of a 2D Rydberg ice into a topological spin liquid within an optical cavity, providing microscopic evidence of anyons and revealing new strongly-coupled quantum electrodynamics phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a method to induce and detect a $ ext{Z}_2$ spin liquid and anyons in Rydberg matter using cavity vacuum fluctuations, a novel approach in quantum many-body physics.

Findings

Observation of vison and spinon pair proliferation

Detection of anyonic exchange statistics with $ heta_{top} orac{ ext{pi}}{2}$

First microscopic detection of anyons in topological matter

Abstract

Quantum spin liquids are exotic phases of matter that are prevented from being frozen even at zero temperature, and appear disordered by local probes that monitor the subsystems. Driven by quantum fluctuations, topological spin liquids are manifested by their long-range entanglement, and are characterized by quasiparticles with fractional statistics. Here, we make contact of a 2D Rydberg ice to a QED vacuum of an ultra-high-finesse optical cavity, and dynamically promote the frustrated background field of the spin ice to a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ spin liquid. We characterize the deconfined nature of the dynamical gauge theory residing in the strongly-correlated Rydberg matter with Wilsonian loops. We observe the proliferation of vison and spinon pairs by site-resolved fluorescence imaging, and detect the exchange statistical angle $\theta_{\text{top}}\sim\pi/2$ between the two anyons by monitoring the dynamical correlators of the fluctuating cavity photons. Our work provides the first microscopic detection of anyons in a topological quantum matter, and heralds the arrival of strongly-coupled many-body QED, where interacting matter and light are put on equal footing at the level of individual quanta.