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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 26: Ultra-cold plasmas and Rydberg systems (joint session A/Q)

A 26.7: Talk

Thursday, March 17, 2022, 15:30–15:45, A-H1

Phonon dressing of a facilitated one-dimensional Rydberg lattice gas — •Matteo Magoni, Paolo P. Mazza, and Igor Lesanovsky — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 14, 72076 Tübingen, Germany

We study the dynamics of a one-dimensional Rydberg lattice gas under facilitation conditions which implement a so-called kinetically constrained spin system. Here an atom can only be excited to a Rydberg state when one of its neighbours is already excited. Once two or more atoms are simultaneously excited mechanical forces emerge, which couple the internal electronic dynamics of this many-body system to the external vibrational degrees of freedom in the lattice. This electron-phonon coupling results in a so-called phonon dressing of many-body states which in turn impacts on the facilitation dynamics.

In our theoretical study we focus on a scenario in which all energy scales are sufficiently separated such that a perturbative treatment of the coupling between electronic and vibrational states is possible. This allows to analytically derive an effective Hamiltonian for the evolution of clusters of consecutive Rydberg excitations in the presence of phonon dressing [1]. We analyse the spectrum of this Hamiltonian and show, by employing Fano resonance theory, that the interaction between Rydberg excitations and lattice vibrations leads to the emergence of slowly decaying bound states that inhibit fast relaxation of certain initial states. We supplement our analysis by providing detailed experimental considerations on the validity of the approximations used.

[1] M. Magoni et al., arXiv: 2104.11160 (2021)