Quantum critical behavior in strongly interacting Rydberg gases

Understand

We study the appearance of correlated many-body phenomena in an ensemble of atoms driven resonantly into a strongly interacting Rydberg state.

• The ground state of the Hamiltonian describing the driven system exhibits a second order quantum phase transition.
• We derive the critical theory for the quantum phase transition and show that it describes the properties of the driven Rydberg system in the saturated regime.
• We find that the suppression of Rydberg excitations known as blockade phenomena exhibits an algebraic scaling law with a universal exponent.