Confinement induced impurity states in spin chains

Abstract

Quantum simulators hold the promise of probing central questions of high-energy physics in tunable condensed matter platforms, for instance the physics of confinement. Local defects can be an obstacle in these setups harming their simulation capabilities. However, defects in the form of impurities can also be useful as probes of many-body correlations and may lead to fascinating new phenomena themselves. Here, we investigate the interplay between impurity and confinement physics in a basic spin chain setup, showing the emergence of new exotic excitations as impurity-meson bound states with a long lifetime. For weak confinement, semiclassical approximations can describe the capture process in a meson-impurity scattering event. In the strong-confining regime, intrinsic quantum effects are visible through the quantization of the emergent bound state energies which can be readily probed in quantum simulators.

6 + 11 pages, 5 + 3 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator
• False vacuum decay in quantum spin chains
• Energy spectrum of bound-spinons in the quantum Ising spin-chain ferromagnet
• Entanglement generation in $(1+1)D$ QED scattering processes
• Bloch oscillations and the lack of the decay of the false vacuum in a one-dimensional quantum spin chain
• Baryon masses in the three-state Potts field theory in a weak magnetic field
• Realizing and Probing Baryonic Excitations in Rydberg Atom Arrays
• Spatiotemporal dynamics of particle collisions in quantum spin chains

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Prethermalization in one-dimensional quantum many-body systems with confinement
• Entanglement dynamics in confining spin chains
• Dynamical hadron formation in long-range interacting quantum spin chains
• Real-time scattering in the lattice Schwinger model
• Out-of-equilibrium scaling behavior arising during round-trip protocols across a quantum first-order transition
• Escaping fronts in local quenches of a confining spin chain
• Spectroscopic evidence for engineered hadron formation in repulsive fermionic $\text{SU}(N)$ Hubbard Models
• Confinement and false vacuum decay on the Potts quantum spin chain