Experimental Quantum Transport of Rydberg Excitations

Rydberg atom system is an emerging platform for quantum simulations due to its scalability and flexibility in its dynamics. One of the interesting dynamics, excitation transfer dynamics, was explored on Rydberg atoms previously with multiple Rydberg states [1,2], but this scheme requires additional effort on the initial state preparation. Recently, a simple approach only using a single type of Rydberg state was introduced by [3]. We here show the first experimental demonstration of hopping dynamics with this simple method by initializing a single atom from a neutral atom chain to the Rydberg state and applying the laser with the detuning far from both resonant and facilitation conditions [4]. We test the dynamics on the 3 and 4 atom chains and show the robustness of the dynamics to the collective dephasing mostly due to the laser phase noise. Endurance to the thermal noise of the negative detuning was also experimentally tested with respect to the positive detuning. At this moment our experiments show a 60% of success rate of excitation transfer, which is expected to be improved by adiabatically preparing the initial state. Our scheme is expected to be used to simulate real-world physics, for example, synthetic gauge fields generated with the multicolor expansion of this experiment will permit the exploration of rich physics related to nonuniform gauge fields [5].