Renormalized Classical Spin Liquid on the Ruby Lattice

The recent experimental detection of the onset of a dynamically prepared, gapped Z2 quantum spin liquid on the ruby lattice brought the physics of frustrated magnetism and lattice gauge theory to Rydberg tweezer arrays [Semeghini , Probing topological spin liquids on a programmable quantum simulator, ]. 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 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. Published by the American Physical Society 2025