Self-organized criticality in driven dissipative Rydberg gases

A Self-organized transition to a critical point (SOC) has been predicted for the system of an off-resonantly driven ultra-cold Rydberg gas. While the microscopy details can be entirely different, SOC results in universal scaling behavior of macroscopic observables for a vast number of different systems, including e.g. spread of epidemics, activity in neural networks or occurrence and magnitude of earthquakes. In this talk I'll give an introdcution into SOC and to the experimental setup and challenges for ultra-cold physics. At temperatures below 100nK quantum effect become very relevant. The platform allows good controllability of the microscopic interactions, which is hard to achieve in most other systems that feature SOC.