Domain-wall confinement and dynamics in a quantum simulator
Abstract
Particles subject to confinement experience an attractive potential that increases without bound as they separate. A prominent example is colour confinement in particle physics, in which baryons and mesons are produced by quark confinement. Confinement can also occur in low-energy quantum many-body systems when elementary excitations are confined into bound quasiparticles. Here we report the observation of magnetic domain-wall confinement in interacting spin chains with a trapped-ion quantum simulator. By measuring how correlations spread, we show that confinement can suppress information propagation and thermalization in such many-body systems. We quantitatively determine the excitation energy of domain-wall bound states from the non-equilibrium quench dynamics. We also study the number of domain-wall excitations created for different quench parameters, in a regime that is difficult to model with classical computers. This work demonstrates the capability of quantum simulators for investigating high-energy physics phenomena, such as quark collision and string breaking.
- Publication:
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Nature Physics
- Pub Date:
- June 2021
- DOI:
- 10.1038/s41567-021-01194-3
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1912.11117
- Bibcode:
- 2021NatPh..17..742T
- Keywords:
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- Quantum Physics;
- Condensed Matter - Quantum Gases;
- Physics - Atomic Physics
- E-Print:
- 6 pages and 4 figures. Supplementary Materials contain 5 pages and 3 figures