• Corpus ID: 244463119

Anderson localization of a Rydberg electron

@inproceedings{Eiles2021AndersonLO,
  title={Anderson localization of a Rydberg electron},
  author={Matthew T. Eiles and Alexander Eisfeld and Jan Michael Rost},
  year={2021}
}

• M. Eiles, A. Eisfeld, J. Rost
• Published 19 November 2021
• Physics

Highly excited Rydberg atoms inherit their level structure, symmetries, and scaling behavior from the hydrogen atom. We will demonstrate that these fundamental properties enable a thermodynamic limit of a single Rydberg atom subjected to interactions with nearby ground state atoms. The limit is reached by simultaneously increasing the number of ground state atoms and the level of excitation of the Rydberg atom, for which the Coulomb potential supplies infinitely many and highly degenerate excited states. Our study reveals a surprising connection to an archetypal concept of condensed matter physics, Anderson localization, facilitated by a direct mapping between the Rydberg atom’s electronic spectrum and the spectrum of a tight-binding Hamiltonian. The hopping amplitudes of this tight-binding system are determined by the arrangement of ground state atoms and can range from nearest-neighbor to power-law-tailed to effectively infinite-range, giving rise to different localization scenarios. For arrangements yielding nearest-neighbor hopping amplitudes we identify clear signatures of the Anderson localization of the Rydberg electron.