Probing a dipolar Rydberg spin glass

Talk

Spin glasses have been studied for over five decades, yet the microscopic origin of the spin-glass phase remains incompletely understood. Dipolar spin glasses present a particularly challenging case: in the limit of strong disorder, experimental results have been contradictory, raising fundamental questions about the nature of strongly disordered systems with long-range dipolar interactions. Progress in solid-state realizations is limited because interactions with the crystal environment obscure direct observation of the underlying dipolar dynamics.

Here we report the experimental realization of a strongly disordered dipolar Heisenberg XY model in a Rydberg atom quantum simulator. We introduce two protocols to detect energetic–magnetic hysteresis, a phenomenon that emerges in the strong-disorder regime. To further probe the phase structure in this regime, we extend the Kibble–Zurek framework to search for critical behavior associated with a putative spin-glass phase using a global dynamical protocol. This approach is directly applicable to other spin-glass platforms and relies on observables that are less susceptible to experimental noise than those required in conventional methods used to extract spin-glass critical exponents.

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