Title | Domain-wall confinement and dynamics in a quantum simulator |
Publication Type | Journal Article |
Year of Publication | 2021 |
Authors | W.. L. Tan, P.. Becker, F.. Liu, G.. Pagano, K.. S. Collins, A.. De, L.. Feng, H.. B. Kaplan, A.. Kyprianidis, R.. Lundgren, W.. Morong, S.. Whitsitt, A. V. Gorshkov, and C.. Monroe |
Journal | Nat. Phys. |
ISSN | 1745-2473 |
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. Long-range Ising interactions present in one-dimensional spin chains can induce a confining potential between pairs of domain walls, slowing down the thermalization of the system. This has now been observed in a trapped-ion quantum simulator. |
DOI | 10.1038/s41567-021-01194-3 |