Control of single spin-flips in a Rydberg atomic fractal

Abstract

Rydberg atoms trapped by optical tweezers have emerged as a versatile platform to emulate lattices with different geometries, in which long-range interacting spins lead to fascinating phenomena, ranging from spin liquids to topological states of matter. Here, we show that when the lattice has a fractal geometry with Hausdorff dimension 1.58, additional surprises appear. The system is described by a transverse-field Ising model with long-range van der Waals interactions in a Sierpi\`nski gasket fractal. We investigate the problem theoretically using exact diagonalization, variational mean field, quantum Monte Carlo, and a graph-based numerical technique, SIM-GRAPH, which we developed. We find that in the quantum regime, the phase diagram exhibits phases in which the spins flip one-by-one. The theoretical results are in excellent agreement with experiments performed with single 88Sr atoms trapped by optical tweezers arranged in a fractal geometry. The magnetization and von Neumann entanglement entropy reveal several regimes in which single spin-flips are delocalized over many sites of one sublattice, thus allowing for an unprecedented control of a cascade of phase transitions in a manybody system. These results expand the possibilities of Rydberg atoms for quantum information processing and may have profound implications in quantum technology.