Feasibility of long-time, near-equilibrium studies using Rydberg dressing

Determine whether off-resonant Rydberg dressing enables experimental studies of itinerant optical-lattice quantum many-body systems with extended-range interactions over timescales of tens of tunneling times and in near-equilibrium regimes.

Background

Rydberg dressing provides tunable extended-range interactions by off-resonantly coupling ground-state atoms to Rydberg states, yielding soft-core potentials compatible with quantum gas microscopes. While this technique has been demonstrated primarily in pinned-atom spin systems, attempts to use it for itinerant particles have faced strong collective losses due to contaminant Rydberg states causing excitation avalanches.

These losses raised doubts about whether Rydberg-dressed interactions could be sustained long enough to probe itinerant systems for many tunneling times or near equilibrium. The paper situates this uncertainty within prior work and then presents a stroboscopic dressing approach that significantly improves lifetimes, enabling the realization of an effective extended Bose-Hubbard model and studies of both out-of-equilibrium dynamics and near-equilibrium density ordering.