Ultrafast quantum many-body dynamics of Rydberg atoms in an optical lattice*

In recent years, a rapid growth can be found in Rydberg-atom platforms for unveiling quantum many-body systems. In this presentation, we show our effort to explore a novel regime that has been veiled by a restriction in simultaneous excitations due to Rydberg blockade effect. This is enabled by manipulating ultracold atoms at ultrafast time scales beyond the blockade interaction time. Through detecting excited atoms in unit-filled lattices, we observe a variety of many-body phenomena, ranging from nonequilibrium dynamics of overlapping Rydberg electrons to strong spin-motion coupling emerging from rapid variation of interactions over atoms' wavefunction. Those series of observations open a way to explore strongly correlated quantum systems such as exotic phases of Rydberg electrons and spin systems including the motional degree of freedom.