Ergodicity breaking from Rydberg clusters in a driven-dissipative many-body system.

Ding, Dongsheng; Bai, Zhengyang; Liu, Zongkai; Shi, Baosen; Guo, Guangcan; Li, Weibin; Adams, C Stuart

doi:10.1126/sciadv.adl5893

Ergodicity breaking from Rydberg clusters in a driven-dissipative many-body system.

Ding, Dongsheng; Bai, Zhengyang; Liu, Zongkai; Shi, Baosen; Guo, Guangcan; Li, Weibin; Adams, C Stuart

Authors

Dongsheng Ding

Zhengyang Bai

Zongkai Liu

Baosen Shi

Guangcan Guo

Weibin Li

Professor Stuart Adams c.s.adams@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

It is challenging to probe ergodicity breaking trends of a quantum many-body system when dissipation inevitably damages quantum coherence originated from coherent coupling and dispersive two-body interactions. Rydberg atoms provide a test bed to detect emergent exotic many-body phases and nonergodic dynamics where the strong Rydberg atom interaction competes with and overtakes dissipative effects even at room temperature. Here, we report experimental evidence of a transition from ergodic toward ergodic breaking dynamics in driven-dissipative Rydberg atomic gases. The broken ergodicity is featured by the long-time phase oscillation, which is attributed to the formation of Rydberg excitation clusters in limit cycle phases. The broken symmetry in the limit cycle is a direct manifestation of many-body collective effects, which is verified experimentally by tuning atomic densities. The reported result reveals that Rydberg many-body systems are a promising candidate to probe ergodicity breaking dynamics, such as limit cycles, and enable the benchmark of nonequilibrium phase transition.

Citation

Ding, D., Bai, Z., Liu, Z., Shi, B., Guo, G., Li, W., & Adams, C. S. (2024). Ergodicity breaking from Rydberg clusters in a driven-dissipative many-body system. Science Advances, 10(9), Article eadl5893. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adl5893

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jan 29, 2024
Online Publication Date	Mar 1, 2024
Publication Date	Mar 1, 2024
Deposit Date	May 21, 2024
Publicly Available Date	May 21, 2024
Journal	Science advances
Electronic ISSN	2375-2548
Publisher	American Association for the Advancement of Science
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	10
Issue	9
Article Number	eadl5893
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adl5893
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2330591
PMID	38437588

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.