Erlangen 2022 – scientific programme

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 11: Ultra-cold plasmas and Rydberg systems (joint session A/Q)

A 11.4: Poster

Tuesday, March 15, 2022, 16:30–18:30, P

Self-organization of facilitated Rydberg excitations — •Jana Bender, Patrick Mischke, Tanita Klas, Thomas Niederprüm, and Herwig Ott — Department of Physics and research center OPTIMAS, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany

We investigate the facilitation dynamics in a Rydberg system and the expected phase transition resulting from the interplay between driving strength and excitation decay.

In an off-resonantly driven cloud of atoms, the strong dipole-dipole interactions between two Rydberg states will compensate the laser detuning for a specific interatomic distance. For high enough driving strength, this results in a spreading of correlated excitations. We investigate the predicted non-equilibrium steady state phase transition between this active phase and the absorbing phase in which the spread of excitations is suppressed. The influence of disorder in our system might introduce additional, more complex phases dominated by excitation avalanches. Due to a loss of excited atoms, the system self-organizes from the acive phase towards the phase transition.

Our results show a persistant algebraic distribution of excitation cluster sizes independent of starting parameters when the system approaches the phase transition. We observe varying exponents which hint towards the influence of disorder in our system.