Berlin 2014 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 29: Ultracold plasmas and Rydberg systems III (with A)
Q 29.7: Talk
Tuesday, March 18, 2014, 15:30–15:45, BEBEL E44/46
Quantum simulation of correlated solid phases with Rydberg dressed atoms — •Tommaso Macri1, Fabio Cinti2, and Thomas Pohl1 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — 2National Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stellenbosch, South Africa
The realization and control of long-range interactions in atomic systems at low temperatures opens up a whole new realm of many-body physics that has become a central focus of research. Rydberg gases are suited to achieve this goal, as the van der Waals forces between them are many orders of magnitude larger than for ground state atoms. When the electronic ground state is off-resonantly coupled to a highly excited state with strong binary interactions, the two body interaction is modified into a soft core potential. Importantly, despite the repulsion between the admixed Rydberg states, the dressing of the ground state does not lead to atomic trap-loss, both in free space and in optical lattices. At the many body level these non-local interactions provide an optimal playground for the engineering of exotic many body phases. The ability to control and tune interactions and particle numbers in such systems allows the creation of superfluids, crystalline states as well as the long sought supersolid phase. At high densities the ground state breaks translational invariance and global gauge symmetry creating coherent density waves. For low particle densities, the system is shown to feature a solid phase in which zero-point vacancies emerge spontaneously and give rise to superfluid flow of particles through the crystal, providing the first example of defect-induced supersolidity.