Continuous Symmetry Breaking in a Two-dimensional Rydberg Array

Spontaneous symmetry breaking underlies much of our classification of phases of matter and their associated transitions. It provides an example of the power of many-body interactions, enabling a collection of individual degrees of freedom to align its behavior across large spatial and temporal scales. Crucially, the nature of the underlying symmetry being broken determines many of the qualitative properties of the phase; this is illustrated by the case of discrete versus continuous symmetry breaking. Indeed, in contrast to the discrete case, the breaking of a continuous symmetry is governed by Goldstone's theorem, which predicts the existence of gapless modes that mediate power-law correlations. In this work, we realize a two-dimensional dipolar XY model - which exhibits a continuous spin-rotational symmetry - utilizing a Rydberg quantum simulator. We demonstrate the adiabatic preparation of correlated low-temperature states of both the XY ferromagnet and the XY antiferromagnet. In the ferromagnetic case, we characterize the presence of long-range XY order, a feature prohibited in absence of the long-range dipolar interaction. Complementing recent works utilizing the Rydberg-blockade mechanism to realize Ising-type interactions (with a discrete spin rotation symmetry), our work opens the door to exploring the many-body physics of XY interactions in a programmable quantum simulator.