Breakup of Rydberg-blockaded atom clouds via dipole-dipole interactions

Abstract

We investigate resonant dipole-dipole interactions between two "superatoms" of different angular momentum, consisting of two Rydberg-blockaded atom clouds where each of them carries initially a coherently shared single excitation. We demonstrate that the dipole-dipole interaction breaks up the superatoms by removing the excitations from the clouds. The dynamics is akin to an ensemble average over systems where only one atom per cloud participates in entangled motion and excitation transfer. Our findings should thus facilitate the experimental realization of adiabatic exciton transport in Rydberg systems by replacing single sites with atom clouds.