Realization of an extremely anisotropic Heisenberg magnet in Rydberg atom arrays

Understand

Strong mutual interactions correlate elementary excitations of quantum matter and plays a key role in a range of emergent phenomena, from binding and condensation to quantum thermalization and many-body localization.

• Here, we employ a Rydberg quantum simulator to experimentally demonstrate strongly correlated spin transport in anisotropic Heisenberg magnets, where the magnon-magnon interaction can be tuned two orders of magnitude larger than the magnon hopping strength.
• In our approach, the motion of magnons is controlled by an induced spin-exchange interaction through Rydberg dressing, which enables coherent transport of a single Rydberg excitation across a chain of ground-state atoms.
• As the most prominent signature of a giant anisotropy, we show that nearby Rydberg excitations form distinct types of magnon bound states, where a tightly bound pair exhibits frozen dynamics in a fragmented Hilbert space, while a loosely bound pair propagates and establishes correlations beyond a single lattice site.