Emergent devil's staircase without particle-hole symmetry in Rydberg quantum gases with competing attractive and repulsive interactions

Abstract

The devil's staircase is a fractal structure that characterizes the ground state of one-dimensional classical lattice gases with long-range repulsive convex interactions. Its plateaus mark regions of stability for specific filling fractions which are controlled by a chemical potential. Typically such staircase has an explicit particle-hole symmetry, i.e., the staircase at more than half-filling can be trivially extracted from the one at less than half filling by exchanging the roles of holes and particles. Here we introduce a quantum spin chain with competing short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions, i.e. a non-convex potential. In the classical limit the ground state features generalized Wigner crystals that --- depending on the filling fraction --- are either composed of dimer particles or dimer holes which results in an emergent complete devil's staircase without explicit particle-hole symmetry of the underlying microscopic model. In our system the particle-hole symmetry is lifted due to the fact that the staircase is controlled through a two-body interaction rather than a one-body chemical potential. The introduction of quantum fluctuations through a transverse field melts the staircase and ultimately makes the system enter a paramagnetic phase. For intermediate transverse field strengths, however, we identify a region, where the density-density correlations suggest the emergence of quasi long-range order. We discuss how this physics can be explored with Rydberg-dressed atoms held in a lattice.