Abstract
We experimentally realize a Peierls phase in the hopping amplitude of excitations carried by Rydberg atoms, and observe the resulting characteristic chiral motion in a minimal setup of three sites. Our demonstration relies on the intrinsic spin-orbit coupling of the dipolar exchange interaction combined with time-reversal symmetry breaking by a homogeneous external magnetic field. Remarkably, the phase of the hopping amplitude between two sites strongly depends on the occupancy of the third site, thus leading to a correlated hopping associated with a density-dependent Peierls phase. We experimentally observe this density-dependent hopping and show that the excitations behave as anyonic particles with a nontrivial phase under exchange. Finally, we confirm the dependence of the Peierls phase on the geometrical arrangement of the Rydberg atoms.
- Received 28 January 2020
- Accepted 19 March 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.021031
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Popular Summary
The realization of artificial topological matter where interactions play a crucial role is an active topic in quantum simulation. This requires creating, in systems of interacting quantum particles, artificial gauge fields, such as a typical magnetic field. Recently, arrays of interacting Rydberg atoms (atoms with one or more highly excited electrons) have become a promising quantum simulation platform. Contrary to other approaches, these systems reach the strongly correlated regime relatively easily. Therefore, finding a way to engineer gauge fields in this platform is crucial to extend the range of quantum simulations it can perform. Here, we report the experimental realization of an artificial gauge field in Rydberg arrays.
Our approach uses a novel mechanism, relying on the spin-orbit coupling intrinsic to dipolar interactions that appears in Rydberg atoms and creates an artificial magnetic field. In a minimal setting of three atoms, we observe the effect of this field by the motion of a single excitation in a preferred direction (i.e., “chiral motion”). Most importantly, when initializing the system with two excitations, no chiral motion is observed, showing that the gauge field generated by this mechanism actually depends on the presence of another excitation. This behavior can be interpreted in terms of particles that behave like neither fermions nor bosons but like so-called anyons.
The natural extension of this work will be to study similar dynamics in a much larger system, where exotic phases of matter are expected to appear.
