Robust Rydberg facilitation via rapid adiabatic passage
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Rydberg antiblockade, or facilitation, governs interaction-assisted excitation dynamics that generate a wide variety of collective phenomena and correlated many-body behavior, while also forming the basis of protocols for entangling gates, state transfer, and quantum sensing. Despite its rich physics, experimental realization of facilitation has been fragile because the resonance condition requires precise matching between interaction shifts and laser detuning, making the process highly sensitive to atomic position disorder and parameter fluctuations. To overcome this limitation, we develop a robust implementation of Rydberg facilitation based on rapid adiabatic passage. By adiabatically sweeping the laser detuning across the interaction-shifted resonance, our approach is inherently insensitive to typical experimental imperfections. As a direct demonstration, we show that this adiabatically protected facilitation naturally gives rise to avalanche excitation growth in both one- and two-dimensional arrays. This avalanche process yields high gain with exceptionally low background, making it promising for rare-event detection. More broadly, by completely eliminating disorder sensitivity, our approach transforms Rydberg facilitation from an experimentally elusive regime into a robust mechanism implementable with standard cooling techniques and existing optical tweezer platforms, bridging the gap between theoretical proposals and disorder-free experimental realizations of antiblockade-based quantum control.
Source: Physical Review Research
DOI: 10.1103/23x7-g2h6
Authors: Xinghan Wang, Yupeng Wang, Qi-Yu Liang
Institution: Purdue University West Lafayette
Language: English
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,625
Award: G5069669246
OpenAlex ID: W4414817259