Numerical studies of thermalization in few-body Rydberg interactions

Recently, Faoro et al. [Nat. Commun. 6, 8173 (2015)] and Tretyakov et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 173402 (2017)] observed three-body resonances among ultracold Rydberg atoms and Liu et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 133402 (2020)] studied the time-dependence of the two-, three-, and four-body cases. In this system, the two-body dipole-dipole interaction is of the form p + p → s + s'. If this is slightly detuned, additional atoms can make up for the energy gap by effectively transitioning to the nearby p' state. Since this process requires four energy levels, it is computationally expensive to simulate. We have developed a simplified three-level model to explore the dynamics of the time-evolution and thermalization of these few-body interactions. We present the results of our simulations along with comparison to experiment where possible.