Realization of a doped quantum antiferromagnet in a Rydberg tweezer array

Doping an antiferromagnetic (AFM) Mott insulator is central to our understanding of a variety of phenomena in strongly correlated electrons, including high-temperature superconductors1,2. To describe the competition between tunnelling t of hole dopants and AFM spin interactions J, theoretical and numerical studies often focus on the paradigmatic t–J model3 and the direct analogue quantum simulation of this model in the relevant regime of high-particle density has long been sought4,5. Here we realize a doped quantum antiferromagnet with next-nearest-neighbour (NNN) tunnellings t′ (refs. 6–10) and hard-core bosonic holes11 using a Rydberg tweezer platform. We use coherent dynamics between three Rydberg levels, encoding spins and holes12, to implement a tunable bosonic t–J–V model allowing us to study previously inaccessible parameter regimes. We observe dynamical phase separation between hole and spin domains for |t/J| ≪ 1 and demonstrate the formation of repulsively bound hole pairs in a variety of spin backgrounds. The interference between NNN tunnellings t′ and perturbative pair tunnelling gives rise to light and heavy pairs depending on the sign of t. Using the single-site control allows us to study the dynamics of a single hole in 2D square lattice (anti)ferromagnets. The model we implement extends the toolbox of Rydberg tweezer experiments beyond spin-1/2 models13 to a larger class of t–J and spin-1 models14,15.