Robust light bullets in Rydberg gases with moir\'e lattice

TL;DR

This paper predicts the formation of stable three-dimensional light bullets in Rydberg gases influenced by moiré lattice potentials, combining local and long-range nonlinearities to support various vortex and non-vortex soliton states.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism for creating stable 3D light bullets in Rydberg gases using moiré lattice potentials with complex nonlinear interactions.

Findings

Existence of fundamental, dipole, quadrupole, and vortex light bullets.

Identification of stable subfamilies via stability criteria and simulations.

Light bullets occupy finite bandgaps of the moiré lattice spectrum.

Abstract

Rydberg electromagnetically-induced transparency has been widely studied as a medium supporting light propagation under the action of nonlocal nonlinearities. Recently, optical potentials based on moir\'e lattices (MLs) were introduced for exploring unconventional physical states. Here, we predict a possibility of creating fully three-dimensional (3D) light bullets (LBs) in cold Rydberg gases under the action of ML potentials. The nonlinearity includes local self-defocusing and long-range focusing terms, the latter one induced by the Rydberg-Rydberg interaction. We produce zero-vorticity LB families of the fundamental, dipole, and quadrupole types, as well as vortex LBs. They all are gap solitons populating finite bandgaps of the underlying ML spectrum. Stable subfamilies are identified utilizing the combination of the anti-Vakhitov-Kolokolov criterion, computation of eigenvalues for small perturbations, and direct simulations.