Few-body analogue quantum simulation with Rydberg-dressed atoms in optical lattices

Abstract: Most experiments with ultracold atoms in optical lattices have contact interactions, and therefore operate at high densities of around one atom per site to observe the effect of strong interactions. Strong ranged interactions can be generated via Rydberg dressing, which opens the path to explore the physics of few interacting particles. Rather than the unit cells of a crystal, the sites of the optical lattice can now be interpreted as discretized space. This allows studying completely new types of problems in a familiar architecture. We investigate the possibility of realizing problems akin to those found in quantum chemistry, although with a different scaling law in the interactions. Through numerical simulation, we show that simple pseudo-atoms and -molecules could be prepared with high fidelity in state-of-the-art experiments.