Daniel Brady, Jana Bender, Patrick Mischke, Thomas Niederprüm, Herwig Ott, Michael Fleischhauer:
🔓 Phys. Rev. Research 6, 013052 (2024)
The spread of excitations by Rydberg facilitation bears many similarities to epidemics. Such systems can be modeled with Monte-Carlo simulations of classical rate equations to great accuracy as a result of high dephasing. In this paper, we analyze the dynamics of a Rydberg many-body system in the facilitation regime in the limits of high and low temperatures. While in the high-temperature limit a homogeneous mean-field behaviour is recovered, characteristic effects of heterogeneity can be seen in a frozen gas. At large temperatures the system displays an absorbing-state phase transition and, in the presence of an additional loss channel, self-organized criticality. In a frozen or low-temperature gas, excitations are constrained to a network resembling an Erdös-Renyi graph. We show that the absorbing-state phase transition is replaced with an extended Griffiths phase, which we accurately describe by a susceptible-infected-susceptible model on the Erdös-Renyi network taking into account Rydberg blockade. Furthermore, we expand upon an existing macroscopic Langevin equation to more accurately describe the density of Rydberg atoms in the frozen and finite temperature regimes.