01912nas a2200265 4500008004100000245007900041210006900120260001500189520117500204100001601379700001501395700001201410700001501422700002001437700001101457700001301468700001901481700002001500700001701520700001501537700001701552700002501569700001501594856003701609 2019 eng d00aObservation of Domain Wall Confinement and Dynamics in a Quantum Simulator0 aObservation of Domain Wall Confinement and Dynamics in a Quantum c12/23/20193 a
Confinement is a ubiquitous mechanism in nature, whereby particles feel an attractive force that increases without bound as they separate. A prominent example is color confinement in particle physics, in which baryons and mesons are produced by quark confinement. Analogously, confinement can also occur in low-energy quantum many-body systems when elementary excitations are confined into bound quasiparticles. Here, we report the first 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 dramatically suppress information propagation and thermalization in such many-body systems. We are able to quantitatively determine the excitation energy of domain wall bound states from non-equilibrium quench dynamics. Furthermore, we 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 exotic high-energy physics phenomena, such as quark collision and string breaking
1 aTan, W., L.1 aBecker, P.1 aLiu, F.1 aPagano, G.1 aCollins, K., S.1 aDe, A.1 aFeng, L.1 aKaplan, H., B.1 aKyprianidis, A.1 aLundgren, R.1 aMorong, W.1 aWhitsitt, S.1 aGorshkov, Alexey, V.1 aMonroe, C. uhttps://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11117