Experiments have demonstrated that the excitation of atoms embedded in a Bose-Einstein condensate to Rydberg states is accompanied by phonon creation. Here we provide the theoretical basis for the description of phonon-induced decoherence of the superposition of two different Rydberg states. To this end, we determine Rydberg-phonon coupling coefficients using a combination of analytical and numerical techniques. From these coefficients, we calculate bath correlation functions, spectral densities, and reorganization energies. These quantities characterize the influence of the environment and form essential inputs for followup open quantum system approaches. We find that the amplitude of bath correlations scales like the power law nu(-6) with the principal quantum number nu, while reorganization energies scale exponentially, reflecting the extreme tunability of Rydberg atomic properties.

Decoherence affects all quantum systems, natural or artificial, and is the primary obstacle impeding quantum technologies. We show theoretically that for a Rydberg qubit in a Bose condensed environment, experiments can image the system-environment interface that is central for decoherence. High-precision absorption images of the condensed environment will be able to capture transient signals that show the real-time buildup of a mesoscopic entangled state in the environment. This is possible before decoherence sources other than the condensate itself can kick in, since qubit decoherence timescales can be tuned from the order of nanoseconds to microseconds by a choice of the excited Rydberg principal quantum number nu. Imaging the interface will allow detailed explorations of open quantum system concepts and may offer guidance for coherence protection in challenging scenarios with non-Markovian environments.

We show that two major facets of the decoherence paradigm are experimentally accessible for a single impurity atom embedded in a Bose-Einstein condensate, when the impurity is brought into an electronic superposition of two Rydberg states. Not only can the electronic decoherence of the Rydberg atom be read out by microwave interferometry, the platform also provides unique access to the accompanying entangled state of the environment. We theoretically demonstrate signatures of the latter in total atom densities during the transient time in which the impurity is becoming entangled with the medium but the resultant decoherence is not complete yet. The Rydberg impurity thus provides a handle to initiate and read-out mesoscopically entangled superposition states of Bose atom clouds affecting about 500 condensate atoms. We find that the time-scale for its creation and decoherence can be tuned from the order of nanoseconds to microseconds by choice of the excited Rydberg principal quantum number $\nu$, and that Rydberg decoherence dynamics is typically non- Markovian.