Realization of a Rydberg-dressed extended Bose-Hubbard model.

The competition of different length scales in quantum many-body systems leads to phenomena such as correlated dynamics and nonlocal order. To investigate such effects in an itinerant lattice-based quantum simulator, it has been proposed to introduce tunable extended-range interactions using off-resonant optical coupling to Rydberg states, known as Rydberg dressing. In this work, we use this approach to realize an effective one-dimensional extended Bose-Hubbard model. Harnessing our quantum gas microscope, we probe the correlated out-of-equilibrium dynamics of extended-range repulsively bound pairs and "hard rods." By contrast, operating near equilibrium, we observe density ordering when adiabatically turning on the extended-range interactions. Our results pave the way to realizing light-controlled extended-range interacting quantum many-body systems. Editor's summary: Ultracold atoms in optical lattices have been used extensively to simulate the behavior of the Hubbard model, which describes the physics of interacting particles on a lattice. However, past studies focused largely on on-site interactions, which are easier to implement experimentally. Weckesser et al. used the so-called Rydberg dressing technique to create extended-range interactions between rubidium atoms residing in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The researchers used a stroboscopic dressing sequence to control the losses that plagued prior implementations and studied both equilibrium and nonequilibrium behavior of the resulting extended Hubbard model. —Jelena Stajic [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]