Phase diagram of Rydberg-dressed atoms on two-leg square ladders: Coupling supersymmetric conformal field theories on the lattice

Abstract

We investigate the phase diagram of hard-core bosons in two-leg ladders in the presence of soft-shoulder potentials. We show how the competition between local and non-local terms gives rise to a phase diagram with liquid phases with dominant cluster, spin-, and density-wave quasi-long-range ordering. These phases are separated by Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless, Gaussian, and supersymmetric (SUSY) quantum critical transitions. For the latter, we provide a phenomenological description of coupled SUSY conformal field theories, whose predictions are confirmed by matrix-product state simulations. Our results are motivated by, and directly relevant to, recent experiments with Rydberg-dressed atoms in optical lattices, where ladder dynamics has already been demonstrated, and emphasize the capabilities of these setups to investigate exotic quantum phenomena such as cluster liquids and coupled SUSY conformal field theories.