In the last twenty years, Rydberg atoms have become a versatile and much studied system for implementing quantum many-body systems in the framework of quantum computation and quantum simulation. However, even in the absence of coherent evolution Rydberg systems exhibit interesting and non-trivial many-body phenomena such as kinetic constraints and non-equilibrium phase transitions that are relevant in a number of research fields. Here we review our recent work on such systems, where dissipation leads to incoherent dynamics and also to population decay. We show that those two effects, together with the strong interactions between Rydberg atoms, give rise to a number of intriguing phenomena that make cold Rydberg atoms an attractive test-bed for classical many-body processes and quantum generalizations thereof.

中文翻译：

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里德堡原子的耗散多体物理

在最近的二十年中，里德堡原子已经成为一种通用的且经过广泛研究的系统，用于在量子计算和量子模拟的框架内实现量子多体系统。然而，即使在缺乏连贯进化的情况下，Rydberg系统仍会表现出有趣且非平凡的多体现象，例如动力学约束和非平衡相变，这些现象在许多研究领域都具有重要意义。在这里，我们回顾了我们在此类系统上的最新工作，这些系统的耗散会导致不连贯的动态变化，并导致总体衰减。我们证明了这两种效应，以及里德伯格原子之间的强相互作用，引起了许多有趣的现象，使冷的里德伯格原子成为经典多体过程及其量子概化的有吸引力的试验台。