Many-body radiative decay in strongly interacting Rydberg ensembles

TL;DR

This paper investigates how strong interactions among Rydberg atoms influence their spontaneous emission, leading to many-body dissipation effects that impact decoherence and phase transitions in these quantum systems.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of interaction-modified collective dissipation in Rydberg ensembles, revealing new many-body effects on spontaneous emission and decoherence.

Findings

Interactions modify photon emission frequencies based on local atom neighborhoods.

Spontaneous emission becomes a many-body process with collective jump operators.

Interaction-driven dissipation influences decoherence rates and phase transitions.

Abstract

When atoms are excited to high-lying Rydberg states they interact strongly with dipolar forces. The resulting state-dependent level shifts allow to study many-body systems displaying intriguing nonequilibrium phenomena, such as constrained spin systems, and are at the heart of numerous technological applications, e.g., in quantum simulation and computation platforms. Here, we show that these interactions have also a significant impact on dissipative effects caused by the inevitable coupling of Rydberg atoms to the surrounding electromagnetic field. We demonstrate that their presence modifies the frequency of the photons emitted from the Rydberg atoms, making it dependent on the local neighborhood of the emitting atom. Interactions among Rydberg atoms thus turn spontaneous emission into a many-body process which manifests, in a thermodynamically consistent Markovian setting, in the emergence of collective jump operators in the quantum master equation governing the dynamics. We discuss how this collective dissipation - stemming from a mechanism different from the much studied super- and sub-radiance - accelerates decoherence and affects dissipative phase transitions in Rydberg ensembles.