Adiabatic Quantum Zeno Dynamics of Bosonic Atom Pairs with Large Inelastic Losses

We report on experiments exploring the non-Hermitian dynamics of pairs of two-level atoms tightly confined in an optical lattice and driven by a near-resonant laser. Although spontaneous emission is negligible for the long-lived excited state, two-body dissipation arises from strong inelastic collisions between two atoms in the excited state. We demonstrate quasi-adiabatic control of the internal state of the pairs in the quantum Zeno regime where inelastic losses dominate. Preparing each atom pair in the longest-lived eigenstate of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian describing the dissipative dynamics, we measure a lifetime enhanced by more than two orders of magnitude in comparison to the bare two-body lifetime. The measured enhancement factor is in quantitative agreement with the expected lifetime of the prepared ``non-Hermitian dressed state’'.