Dissipation-sensitive multiphoton excitations of strongly interacting Rydberg atoms

We theoretically investigate the effect of dissipation on multiphoton excitation of Rydberg atoms. The steady states and the dynamics are compared via two types of four-level excitation schemes with different dissipative paths of spontaneous emission. We find that in the case of strong Rydberg-Rydberg interaction, the schemes will settle in several different nonequilibrium steady states. The interesting aspect is that there exist the multistable steady states, which reveals the competition between interaction-induced nonlinearity and dissipation caused by spontaneous emission. A numerical simulation on the Rydberg population dynamics in the bistable region exhibits different features existing in the two schemes even with the same initial conditions, which accounts for the influence of the dissipation on the dynamics.