Abstract
We investigate the possibility of a bistable phase in an open many-body system. To this end we discuss the microscopic dynamics of a continuously off-resonantly driven Rydberg lattice gas in the regime of strong decoherence. Our experimental results reveal a prolongation of the temporal correlations with respect to the lifetime of a single Rydberg excitation and show strong evidence for the formation of finite-sized Rydberg excitation clusters in the steady state. We simulate our data using a simplified and a full many-body rate-equation model. The results are compatible with the formation of metastable states associated with a bimodal counting distribution as well as dynamic hysteresis. A scaling analysis reveals however, that the correlation times remain finite for all relevant system parameters. This suggest that the Rydberg aggregate is composed of many small clusters and all correlation lengths remain finite. This is a strong indication for the absence of a global bistable phase, previously suggested to exist in this system.
Highlights
Recent progress in experimental control offers unique possibilities to study the interplay between pure quantum mechanical systems and their coupling to reservoirs
The results are compatible with the formation of metastable states associated with a bimodal counting distribution as well as dynamic hysteresis
One interesting aspect observed in recent antiblockade experiments using a full counting analysis is a bimodal excitation number distribution [27,28] and a hysteresis in the excitation dynamics [13,17]
Summary
Recent progress in experimental control offers unique possibilities to study the interplay between pure quantum mechanical systems and their coupling to reservoirs. One interesting aspect observed in recent antiblockade experiments using a full counting analysis is a bimodal excitation number distribution [27,28] and a hysteresis in the excitation dynamics [13,17] It has been under debate whether this indicates a transition to a bistable steady state of the open many-body system [8,9,13,16,29,30]. The bimodal character of the full counting distribution [28] disappears when the observed system size exceeds the correlation length, while a dynamic hysteresis can still be observed, provided the sweep time is sufficiently small [32] This suggests that the Rydberg aggregate in the antiblockade regime consists of many small independent clusters and is incompatible with a global bistable regime
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