Evaporative cooling to a Rydberg crystal close to its ground state

Abstract

We theoretically show how to obtain a long one-dimensional crystal near its quantum ground state. We rely on an evaporative cooling scheme applicable to many-body systems with nonzero-ranged interactions. Despite the absence of periodic potentials, the final state is a crystal that exhibits long-range spatial order. We describe the scheme thermodynamically, applying the truncated Boltzmann distribution to the collective excitations of the chain, and we show that it leads to a novel quasiequilibrium many-body state. For longer chains, comprising about 1000 atoms, we emphasize the quasiuniversality of the evaporation curve. Such exceptionally long one-dimensional (1D) crystals are only accessible deep in the quantum regime. We perform our analysis on the example of an initially thermal chain of circular Rydberg atoms confined to a 1D geometry. Our scheme may be applied to other quantum systems with long-ranged interactions such as polar molecules.