  We study the collective excitation of a gas of highly excited atoms confined
to a large spacing ring lattice, where the ground and the excited states are
coupled resonantly via a laser field. Our attention is focused on the regime
where the interaction between the highly excited atoms is very weak in
comparison to the Rabi frequency of the laser. We demonstrate that in this case
the many-body excitations of the system can be expressed in terms of free
spinless fermions. The complex many-particle states arising in this regime are
characterized and their properties, e.g. their correlation functions, are
studied. In addition we investigate how one can actually experimentally access
some of these many-particle states by a temporal variation of the laser
parameters.
