Seminar by Mr Sylvain de Léséleuc 'Experimental many-body physics using arrays of individual Rydberg atoms'

Speaker:
Mr Sylvain de Léséleuc, Institut d'Optique - Orsay, France
 

Talk title:
Experimental many-body physics using arrays of individual Rydberg atoms

Abstract:
I will present our effort to control the dipole-dipole interaction between single Rydberg atoms to implement various spin Hamiltonians that could be useful for the quantum simulation of various condensed matter problems.
Our platform is based on single atoms trapped in an array of optical tweezers generated by holography. With our atom assembler technique, we overcome the random loading of the traps to prepare fully loaded, 2 or 3d, arrays of single atoms.
As a first example of spin Hamiltonian,  we can implement the quantum Ising model by coupling ground-state atoms to one Rydberg state and use the van der Waals interaction between two Rydberg atoms. I will describe the evolution of the system after a sudden quench of the Hamiltonian, or contrarily after an adiabatic change of the parameters, where we observed the build-up of anti-ferromagnetic correlations between the spins.
I will also briefly show how we can control the resonant dipole-dipole interaction between Rydberg states of different parities, which leads to a spin excitation hopping from one atom to another. We have recently developed optical tools to locally control this interaction which opens exciting prospects for the simulation of XY Hamiltonians and topological problems.