Speaker
Hans Peter Büchler
(Universität Stuttgart)
Description
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. Special focus is on the system in one
dimension in the presence of an underlying lattice
structure, where we will show that in the driven system a
two-stage melting takes place from a commensurate solid
into a floating solid phase and finally into a paramagnetic
phase.
