Phonon dressing of a facilitated one-dimensional Rydberg lattice gas

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a one-dimensional Rydberg lattice gas under facilitation (antiblockade) conditions which implements a so-called kinetically constrained spin system. Here an atom can only be excited to a Rydberg state when one of its neighbors is already excited. Once two or more atoms are simultaneously excited mechanical forces emerge, which couple the internal electronic dynamics of this many-body system to external vibrational degrees of freedom in the lattice. This electron-phonon coupling results in a so-called phonon dressing of many-body states which in turn impacts on the facilitation dynamics. In our theoretical study we focus on a scenario in which all energy scales are sufficiently separated such that a perturbative treatment of the coupling between electronic and vibrational states is possible. This allows to analytically derive an effective Hamiltonian for the evolution of clusters of consecutive Rydberg excitations in the presence of phonon dressing. We analyze the spectrum of this Hamiltonian and show — by employing Fano resonance theory — that the interaction between Rydberg excitations and lattice vibrations leads to the emergence of slowly decaying bound states that inhibit fast relaxation of certain initial states.