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We introduce a scheme to entangle Rydberg ions in a linear ion crystal, using the high electric polarizability of the Rydberg electronic states in combination with mutual Coulomb coupling of ions that establishes common modes of motion. After laser-initialization of ions to a superposition of ground- and Rydberg-state, the entanglement operation is driven purely by applying a voltage pulse that shuttles the ion crystal back and forth. This operation can achieve entanglement on a sub-$\mu$s timescale, more than two orders of magnitude faster than typical gate operations driven by continuous-wave lasers. Our analysis shows that the fidelity achieved with this protocol can exceed $99.9\%$ with experimentally achievable parameters., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

We study electromagnetically induced transparency of a ladder type configuration in ultracold atomic gases, where the upper level is an electronically highly excited Rydberg state. The strong two-body interaction in the Rydberg state leads to the excitation blockade, where all but one atoms are shifted out of resonance such that the transmission of the probe light is affected. We show that molecular coupling in the Rydberg state causes an effective, two-body dephasing. The presence of the two-body dephasing leads to a similar blockade effect. Hence the overall blockade effect is enhanced by the two-body dephasing. Through numerical and approximately analytical calculations, we find that the transmission is reduced drastically by the presence of two-body dephasing in the transparent window, which is accompanied by strong photon-photon anti-bunching. Around the Autler-Townes splitting, the photon bunching is amplified by the two-body dephasing., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

Realizing single light bullets and vortices that are stable in high dimensions is a long-standing goal in the study of nonlinear optical physics. On the other hand, the storage and retrieval of such stable high dimensional optical pulses may offer a variety of applications. Here we present a scheme to generate such optical pulses in a cold Rydberg atomic gas. By virtue of electromagnetically induced transparency, strong, long-range atom-atom interaction in Rydberg states is mapped to light fields, resulting in a giant, fast-responding nonlocal Kerr nonlinearity and the formation of light bullets and vortices carrying orbital angular momenta, which have extremely low generation power, very slow propagation velocity, and can stably propagate, with the stability provided by the combination of local and the nonlocal Kerr nonlinearities. We demonstrate that the light bullets and vortices obtained can be stored and retrieved in the system with high efficiency and fidelity. Our study provides a new route for manipulating high-dimensional nonlinear optical processes via the controlled optical nonlinearities in cold Rydberg gases.

Sagnac interferometers with massive particles promise unique advantages in achieving high precision measurements of rotation rates over their optical counterparts. Recent proposals and experiments are exploring non-ballistic Sagnac interferometers where trapped atoms are transported along a closed path. This is achieved by using superpositions of internal quantum states and their control with state-dependent potentials. We address emergent questions regarding the dynamical behavior of Bose-Einstein condensates in such an interferometer and its impact on rotation sensitivity. We investigate complex dependencies on atomic interactions as well as trap geometries, rotation rates, and speed of operation. We find that temporal transport profiles obtained from a simple optimization strategy for non-interacting particles remain surprisingly robust also in the presence of interactions over a large range of realistic parameters. High sensitivities can be achieved for short interrogation times far from the adiabatic regime. This highlights a route to building fast and robust guided ring Sagnac interferometers with fully trapped atoms., Comment: 5 + 3 pages, 6 figures

In this paper, we propose a scheme to implement the two-qubit controlled-Z gate via the Stark-tuned F\"orster interaction of Rydberg atoms, where the F\"orster defect is driven by a time-dependent electric field of a simple sinusoidal function while the matrix elements of the dipole-dipole interaction are time-independent. It is shown that when the system is initially in a specific state, it makes a cyclic evolution after a preset interaction time, returning to the initial state, but picks up a phase, which can be used for realizing a two-atom controlled-Z gate. Due to the interference of sequential Landau-Zener transitions, the population and phase of the state is quasi-deterministic after the cyclic evolution and therefore the gate fidelity is insensitive to fluctuations of the interaction time and the dipole-dipole matrix elements. Feasibility of the scheme realized with Cs atoms is discussed in detail, which shows that the two-qubit gate via Landau-Zener control can be realized with the state-of-the-art experimental setup., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures

We present a robust and accurate numerical method to solve the modified Buckley-Leverett equation in two-phase porous media flow with dynamic capillary pressure effect. A symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method is used to discretize the equation in the space direction. For accuracy and stability issues, the third-order strong stability preserving implicit-explicit Runge-Kutta method is adopted to solve the nonlinear semi-discrete system: the linear diffusion term is discretized implicitly while the nonlinear flux term is discretized explicitly. The spatial accuracy of the discontinuous Galerkin method depends on the limiters applied to the solution: we test a minmod-TVB limiter, a simple WENO limiter and a high-order shock-capturing moment limiter to demonstrate that a suitable shock capturing moment limiter leads to more accurate approximation of solution. A set of representative numerical experiments are presented to show the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach. The results indicate that the moment limiter proposed by Moe et al. [Arxiv:1507.03024, 2015] is the most suitable one to be used in solving the modified Buckley- Leverett equation, and high order schemes perform much better than lower order schemes. Our simulation results are consistent with the previous results in Kao et al.[J. Sci. Comput., 64(3) (2015), 837-857], Zhang and Zegeling [J. Comput. Phys., 345 (2017), 510-527 and Commun. Comput. Phys., 22(4) (2017), 935-964]., Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables

We present and analyze spin models with long-range interactions whose ground state features a so-called devil's staircase and where plateaus of the staircase are accessed by varying two-body interactions. This is in contrast to the canonical devil's staircase, for example occurring in the one-dimensional Ising model with long-range interactions, where typically a single-body chemical potential is varied to scan through the plateaus. These systems, moreover, typically feature a particle-hole symmetry which trivially connects the hole part of the staircase (filling fraction $f\geq1/2$) to its particle part ($f\leq1/2$). Such symmetry is absent in our models and hence the particle sector and the hole sector can be separately controlled, resulting in exotic hybrid staircases., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures; close to published version

We investigate the dynamics of a generic interacting many-body system under conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). This problem is of current relevance due to its connection to non-linear optical media realized by Rydberg atoms. In an interacting system the structure of the dynamics and the approach to the stationary state becomes far more complex than in the case of conventional EIT. In particular, we discuss the emergence of a metastable decoherence free subspace, whose dimension for a single Rydberg excitation grows linearly in the number of atoms. On approach to stationarity this leads to a slow dynamics which renders the typical assumption of fast relaxation invalid. We derive analytically the effective non-equilibrium dynamics in the decoherence free subspace which features coherent and dissipative two-body interactions. We discuss the use of this scenario for the preparation of collective entangled dark states and the realization of general unitary dynamics within the spin-wave subspace., Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures

Recent experiments have illustrated that long range two-body interactions can be induced by laser coupling atoms to highly excited Rydberg states. Stimulated by this achievement, we study supersolidity of lattice bosons in an experimentally relevant situation. In our setup, we consider two-component atoms on a square lattice, where one species is weakly dressed to an electronically high-lying (Rydberg) state, generating a tunable, soft-core shape long-range interaction. Interactions between atoms of the second species and between the two species are characterized by local inter- and intra-species interactions. Using a dynamical mean-field calculation, we find that interspecies onsite interactions can stabilize a pronounced region of supersolid phases. This is characterized by two distinctive types of supersolids, where the bare species forms supersolid phases that are immersed in strongly correlated quantum phases, i.e. a crystalline solid or supersolid of the dressed atoms. We show that the interspecies interaction leads to a roton-like instability in the bare species and therefore is crucially important to the supersolid formation. We provide a detailed calculation of the interaction potential to show how our results can be explored under current experimental conditions., Comment: 4.5 pages, 4 figures, supplementary material (6 pages and 2 figures)

Trapped Rydberg ions are a promising new system for quantum information processing. They have the potential to join the precise quantum operations of trapped ions and the strong, long-range interactions between Rydberg atoms. Technically, the ion trap will need to stay active while exciting the ions into the Rydberg state, else the strong Coulomb repulsion will quickly push the ions apart. Thus, a thorough understanding of the trap effects on Rydberg ions is essential for future applications. Here we report the observation of two fundamental trap effects. First, we investigate the interaction of the Rydberg electron with the quadrupolar electric trapping field. This effect leads to Floquet sidebands in the spectroscopy of Rydberg D-states whereas Rydberg S-states are unaffected due to their symmetry. Second, we report on the modified trapping potential in the Rydberg state compared to the ground state which results from the strong polarizability of the Rydberg ion. We observe the resultant energy shifts as a line broadening which can be suppressed by cooling the ion to the motional ground state in the directions orthogonal to the excitation laser.

We investigate the quantum melting of one dimensional crystals that are realized in an atomic lattice in which ground state atoms are laser excited to two Rydberg states. We focus on a regime where both, intra- and inter-state density-density interactions as well as coherent exchange interactions contribute. We determine stable crystalline phases in the classical limit and explore their melting under quantum fluctuations introduced by the excitation laser as well as two-body exchange. We find that within a specific parameter range quantum fluctuations introduced by the laser can give rise to a devil's staircase structure which one might associate with transitions in the classical limit. The melting through exchange interactions is shown to also proceed in a step-like fashion, in case of small crystals, due to the proliferation of Rydberg spinwaves., Comment: 6+2 pages, 4+1 figures, 1 table, published version