Excitation transport through Rydberg dressing

We show how to create long-range interactions between alkali atoms in different hyperfine ground states, with the goal of coherent quantum transport. The scheme uses off-resonant dressing with atomic Rydberg states. We demonstrate coherent migration of electronic excitation through dressed dipole-dipole interaction by full solutions of models with four essential states per atom and give the structure of the spectrum of dressed states for a dimer. In addition, we present an effective (perturbative) Hamiltonian for the ground-state manifold and show that it correctly describes the full multi-state dynamics. We discuss excitation transport in detail for a chain of five atoms. In the presented scheme, the actual population in the Rydberg state is kept small. Dressing offers many advantages over the direct use of Rydberg levels: it reduces ionization probabilities and provides an additional tuning parameter for lifetimes and interaction strengths.