Renormalized Classical Spin Liquid on the Ruby Lattice

The recent experimental detection of the onset of a dynamically prepared, gapped Z_{2} quantum spin liquid on the ruby lattice brought the physics of frustrated magnetism and lattice gauge theory to Rydberg tweezer arrays [Semeghini et al., Probing topological spin liquids on a programmable quantum simulator, Science 374, 1242 (2021)SCIEAS0036-807510.1126/science.abi8794]. The thermodynamic properties of such models remain inadequately addressed, yet knowledge thereof is indispensable if one wants to prepare large, robust, and long-lived quantum spin liquids. Using large scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations we find in the PXP model a renormalized classical spin liquid with constant entropy density S/N approaching ln(2)/6 in the thermodynamic limit for all moderate and large values of the detuning δ and starting from T/Ω∼0.5 (in units of the Rabi frequency Ω) down to the lowest temperatures we could simulate, T/Ω∼0.01. With van der Waals interactions, constant entropy plateaus are still found but its value shifts with δ. We comment on the implications of the adiabatic approximation to the dynamical ramps for the electric degrees of freedom, which leads to a reinterpretation of the experimental observations.