TY - JOUR T1 - Prethermalization and dynamical transition in an isolated trapped ion spin chain JF - New Journal of Physics Y1 - 2013 A1 - Zhe-Xuan Gong A1 - L. -M. Duan AB - We propose an experimental scheme to observe prethermalization and dynamical transition in one-dimensional XY spin chain with long range interaction and inhomogeneous lattice spacing, which can be readily implemented with the recently developed trapped-ion quantum simulator. Local physical observables are found to relax to prethermal values at intermediate time scale, followed by complete relaxation to thermal values at much longer time. The physical origin of prethermalization is explained by spotting a non-trivial structure in lower half of the energy spectrum. The dynamical behavior of the system is shown to cross difference phases when the interaction range is continuously tuned, indicating the existence of dynamical phase transition. VL - 15 U4 - 113051 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0985v1 CP - 11 J1 - New J. Phys. U5 - 10.1088/1367-2630/15/11/113051 ER -