• Rydberg atoms
• Cold atoms
• Engineered dissipation
• Driven-dissipative system

The use of Rydberg atoms is revealing itself as an efficient tool to be used in quantum computation. Recently, it has been suggested that controlled dissipation in such systems could be used for different purposes, e.g. speeding up the relaxation of driven-dissipative dynamics or the dissipative creation of correlated quantum states.
In this thesis I have experimentally implemented and characterized controlled dissipation
in a cold atom set-up with 87Rb Rydberg atoms. In particular I focused on the controlled
dissipation to investigate the competition between the excitation and the depumping rate and to accelerate the dynamics of the system with respect to spontaneous decay of the Rydberg state (for which the time scale is around 150 𝜇s).
After the characterization of the artificial dissipation we coupled it to the excitation. We could represent the system with a three-level model where the excitation couples
the ground state and the Rydberg state and the depumping
beam drives the transition 70𝑆 → 6𝑃3/2. We expected to see a steady-state number of excitations that should depend on the ratio of the excitation rate and the depumping rate. In summary, we obtained a dissipation channel and we added the possibility to control a
forced dissipation to the existing Rydberg atoms set-up which, as a first approximation,
is described by a three-level model. This implementation can be applied to the simulation of dissipative systems and could be used to create entangled
states or correlated states to use in quantum computation protocols.