Abstract
We investigate the evolution of interacting Rydberg gases in the limit of strong noise and dissipation. Starting from a description in terms of a Markovian quantum master equation we derive effective equations of motion that govern the dynamics on a ‘coarse-grained’ timescale where fast dissipative degrees of freedom have been adiabatically eliminated. Specifically, we consider two scenarios which are of relevance for current theoretical and experimental studies—Rydberg atoms in a two-level (spin) approximation subject to strong dephasing noise as well as Rydberg atoms under so-called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) conditions and fast radiative decay. In the former case we find that the effective dynamics is described by classical rate equations up to second order in an appropriate perturbative expansion. This drastically reduces the computational complexity of numerical simulations in comparison to the full quantum master equation. When accounting for the fourth order correction in this expansion, however, we find that the resulting equation breaks the preservation of positivity and thus cannot be interpreted as a proper classical master rate equation. In the EIT system we find that the expansion up to second order retains information not only on the ‘classical’ observables, but also on some quantum coherences. Nevertheless, this perturbative treatment still achieves a non-trivial reduction of complexity with respect to the original problem.
Highlights
Gases of interacting highly excited Rydberg atoms are becoming an increasingly popular theoretical and experimental platform for the investigation of the physics of strongly interacting many-body systems [1, 2]
We show that in the limit of strong dephasing the dynamics of the interacting two-level systems is described — up to second order in the relevant perturbative expansion — by a classical rate equation; the corresponding stochastic process is described by single spin flips subject to kinetic constraints [32]
By relying on a time-scale separation between a fast and a slow dynamics, effectively integrating out the fast degrees of freedom and using perturbation theory, we have obtained effective equations of motion that approximately describe the dynamics of a selected set of observables of the system within a reduced subspace
Summary
Gases of interacting highly excited Rydberg atoms are becoming an increasingly popular theoretical and experimental platform for the investigation of the physics of strongly interacting many-body systems [1, 2]. The evolution is typically well described in terms of a quantum master equation with Markovian noise (an overview on methods for treating the non-Markovian case as well can be found in [15]) While such a modelling is certainly among the simplest descriptions of an open quantum system it still poses severe challenges when trying to conduct a numerical treatment for large system sizes N. We show that in the limit of strong dephasing the dynamics of the interacting two-level systems is described — up to second order in the relevant perturbative expansion — by a classical rate equation; the corresponding stochastic process is described by single spin flips subject to kinetic constraints [32].
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