Mesoscopic Rydberg-blockaded ensembles in the superatom regime and beyond

International audienceThe control of strongly interacting many-body systems enables the creation of tailored quantum matter with complex properties. Atomic ensembles that are optically driven to a Rydberg state provide many examples for this: atom-atom entanglement, many-body Rabi oscillations, strong photon-photon interaction and spatial pair correlations. In its most basic form Rydberg quantum matter consists of an isolated ensemble of strongly interacting atoms spatially confined to the blockade volume--a superatom. Here we demonstrate the controlled creation and characterization of an isolated mesoscopic superatom by means of accurate density engineering and excitation to Rydberg p-states. Its variable size allows the investigation of the transition from effective two-level physics to many-body phenomena. By monitoring continuous laser-induced ionization we observe a strongly anti-bunched ion emission under blockade conditions and extremely bunched ion emission under off-resonant excitation. Our measurements provide insights into both excitation statistics and dynamics. We anticipate applications in quantum optics and quantum information as well as many-body physics experiments