Correlated Exciton Transport in Rydberg-Dressed-Atom Spin Chains

We investigate the transport of excitations through a chain of atoms with nonlocal dissipation introduced through coupling to additional short-lived states. The system is described by an effective spin-$1/2$ model where the ratio of the exchange interaction strength to the reservoir coupling strength determines the type of transport, including coherent exciton motion, incoherent hopping, and a regime in which an emergent length scale leads to a preferred hopping distance far beyond nearest neighbors. For multiple impurities, the dissipation gives rise to strong nearest-neighbor correlations and entanglement. These results highlight the importance of nontrivial dissipation, correlations, and many-body effects in recent experiments on the dipole-mediated transport of Rydberg excitations.