Ultrafast Creation of Overlapping Rydberg Electrons in an Atomic BEC and Mott-Insulator Lattice.

We study an array of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice (Mott insulator) excited with a coherent ultrashort laser pulse to a state where single-electron wave functions spatially overlap. Beyond a threshold principal quantum number where Rydberg orbitals of neighboring lattice sites overlap with each other, the atoms efficiently undergo spontaneous Penning ionization resulting in a drastic change of ion-counting statistics, sharp increase of avalanche ionization, and the formation of an ultracold plasma. These observations signal the actual creation of electronic states with overlapping wave functions, which is further confirmed by a significant difference in ionization dynamics between a Bose-Einstein condensate and a Mott insulator.

A coherent quantum annealer with Rydberg atoms.

There is a significant ongoing effort in realizing quantum annealing with different physical platforms. The challenge is to achieve a fully programmable quantum device featuring coherent adiabatic quantum dynamics. Here we show that combining the well-developed quantum simulation toolbox for Rydberg atoms with the recently proposed Lechner-Hauke-Zoller (LHZ) architecture allows one to build a prototype for a coherent adiabatic quantum computer with all-to-all Ising interactions and, therefore, a platform for quantum annealing.

Designing frustrated quantum magnets with laser-dressed Rydberg atoms.

We show how a broad class of lattice spin-1/2 models with angular- and distance-dependent couplings can be realized with cold alkali atoms stored in optical or magnetic trap arrays. The effective spin-1/2 is represented by a pair of atomic ground states, and spin-spin interactions are obtained by admixing van der Waals interactions between fine-structure split Rydberg states with laser light. The strengths of the diagonal spin interactions as well as the "flip-flop," and "flip-flip" and "flop-flop" interactions can be tuned by exploiting quantum interference, thus realizing different spin symmetries.

Atomic Rydberg reservoirs for polar molecules.

We discuss laser-dressed dipolar and van der Waals interactions between atoms and polar molecules, so that a cold atomic gas with laser admixed Rydberg levels acts as a designed reservoir for both elastic and inelastic collisional processes. The elastic scattering channel is characterized by large elastic scattering cross sections and repulsive shields to protect from close encounter collisions. In addition, we discuss a dissipative (inelastic) collision where a spontaneously emitted photon carries away (kinetic) energy of the collision partners, thus providing a significant energy loss in a single collision.