Few-body analogue quantum simulation with Rydberg-dressed atoms in optical lattices

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of Rydberg-dressed atoms in optical lattices to simulate few-body quantum systems, enabling the study of complex interactions similar to quantum chemistry within a controllable experimental setup.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility of realizing few-body quantum simulations with Rydberg-dressed atoms in optical lattices, highlighting new possibilities for quantum chemistry analogues.

Findings

High-fidelity preparation of pseudo-atoms and molecules possible

Rydberg dressing enables controllable long-range interactions

Simulation results suggest experimental viability

Abstract

Most experiments with ultracold atoms in optical lattices have contact interactions, and therefore operate at high densities of around one atom per site to observe the effect of strong interactions. Strong ranged interactions can be generated via Rydberg dressing, which opens the path to explore the physics of few interacting particles. Rather than the unit cells of a crystal, the sites of the optical lattice can now be interpreted as discretized space. This allows studying completely new types of problems in a familiar architecture. We investigate the possibility of realizing problems akin to those found in quantum chemistry, although with a different scaling law in the interactions. Through numerical simulation, we show that simple pseudo-atoms and -molecules could be prepared with high fidelity in state-of-the-art experiments.