Ultrafast many-body electron dynamics in a strongly-correlated ultracold Rydberg gas

Many-body correlations govern a variety of important quantum phenomena such as the emergence of superconductivity and magnetism in condensed matter. Understanding quantum many-body systems is thus one of the central goals of modern sciences. We have demonstrated a new approach towards this goal by generating a strongly-correlated ultracold Rydberg gas with a broadband picosecond pulsed-laser excitation of a disordered ensemble of Rb atoms in an optical dipole trap [1, 2]. The strong many-body correlations have been manifested in ultrafast electron dynamics observed by time-domain Ramsey interferometry with attosecond precision. Our approach will offer a versatile platform to observe and manipulate nonequilibrium dynamics of strongly-correlated quantum many-body systems on the ultrafast timescale.