Condensed Matter Seminars

Recently, ladder-shaped arrays of Rydberg atoms have been used to simulate scalar QED in 1+1 dimensions. This type of analog quantum simulator has a rich phase diagram which has been explored experimentally using QuEra facilities. We report recent results regarding the observation of a floating phase (2401.08087) and the derivation of an effective Hamiltonian (2312.04436) for the simulator. Entanglement entropy plays a crucial role in the determination of the phase diagram. We describe a recent proposal (2404.09935 ) to extract the entanglement entropy with user-driven QuEra measurements of a single copy of the system instead of the twin copy method. We show empirically that this estimation provides a lower bound which becomes tighter when the empirical probabilities are filtered.