Resonant pair production and flat band melting in a driven Rydberg chain
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Tista Banerjee, K. Sengupta · arXiv: 2610.22532v1 · Summary page
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When a Rydberg blockade springs a leak
In chains of highly excited Rydberg atoms, strong interactions can prevent neighboring atoms from being excited together. This “blockade” makes a complicated system easier to describe—but a real blockade is never infinitely strong. A theoretical study examines how that imperfection changes a periodically driven chain, disrupting a special flat structure in its spectrum of driven states.
The researchers identify two routes to this breakdown: resonances that produce neighboring excitation pairs, and virtual processes that pass through such pair configurations. Calculations checked against exact numerical results show that the outcome depends strongly on the starting state. A chain with no excitations is unusually resistant to resonant pair formation, while other patterns display slow oscillations or long-lived special states absent from the ideal blockade model. Measuring neighboring excitation pairs offers a practical way to test these predictions in Rydberg-atom experiments.
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