Few-Body Analog Quantum Simulation with Rydberg-Dressed Atoms in Optical Lattices

Most experiments with ultracold atoms in optical lattices have contact interactions and therefore operate at high densities of around one atom per site to observe the effect of strong interactions. Strong ranged interactions can be generated via Rydberg dressing, which opens up the path to exploring the physics of few interacting particles. Rather than the unit cells of a crystal, the sites of the optical lattice can now be interpreted as discretized space. This allows the study of completely new types of problems in a familiar architecture. We investigate the possibility of realizing problems akin to those found in quantum chemistry, although with a different scaling law in the interactions. Through numerical simulation, we show that simple pseudoatoms and pseudomolecules could be prepared with high fidelity in state-of-the-art experiments.