Rydberg Composites

Abstract

We introduce the Rydberg Composite, a new class of Rydberg matter where a single Rydberg atom is interfaced with a dense environment of neutral ground state atoms. The properties of the Composite depend on both the Rydberg excitation, which provides the gross energetic and spatial scales, and on the distribution of ground state atoms within the volume of the Rydberg wave function, which sculpt the electronic states. The latter range from the "trilobites," for small numbers of scatterers, to delocalized and chaotic eigenstates for disordered scatterer arrays, culminating in the dense scatterer limit in symmetry-dominated wave functions which promise good control in future experiments. We characterize these scenarios with different theoretical methods, enabling us to obtain scaling behavior for the regular spectrum and measures of chaos and delocalization in the disordered regime. Thus, we obtain a systematic description of the Composite states. The 2D monolayer Composite possesses the richest spectrum with an intricate band structure in the limit of homogeneous scatterers.

Ring Rydberg composites

“…The Hamiltonian of Eq. 1 neglects all other atom-atom and atom-ion interactions, and furthermore we assume a frozen gas scenario in which the scatterers do not move [33].…”

“…Ref. [33] details the general structure of Rydberg Composites involving a one, two, and threedimensional scatterer arrangements in a regular lattice.…”

“…Recently, we introduced the Rydberg Composite: a Rydberg atom with principle quantum number ν coupled to a large number of ground state atoms (scatterers) in a well-defined regular or irregular arrangement, such as can be attained in a dense optical lattice or in a typical ultracold gas, respectively [33]. The Rydberg Composite combines the high degeneracy, characteristic eigenfunctions, and scaling behavior of the Coulomb interaction with the engineered or structured environments typical of the solid state.…”

“…The Rydberg Composite combines the high degeneracy, characteristic eigenfunctions, and scaling behavior of the Coulomb interaction with the engineered or structured environments typical of the solid state. Reference [33] details the general structure of Rydberg Composites involving one, two, and threedimensional scatterer arrangements in a regular lattice.…”

Generalized local frame transformation theory for ultralong-range Rydberg molecules

“…One major advantage of the GLFT method over the Green's function treatment, which operates at the same level of accuracy, is that it can be easily extended to other physical systems, for example to Rydberg atoms in the presence of multiple perturbers. This would provide quantitative improvements to the theory of polyatomic Rydberg molecules and Rydberg composites developed in [50,52,53]. In addition, due the modularity of the GLFT toolkit, the local frame transformation for Rydberg molecules presented here can be combined other frame transformations in order to investigate more complicated physical systems, e.g.…”