TY - JOUR T1 - Observation of Domain Wall Confinement and Dynamics in a Quantum Simulator Y1 - 2019 A1 - W. L. Tan A1 - P. Becker A1 - F. Liu A1 - G. Pagano A1 - K. S. Collins A1 - A. De A1 - L. Feng A1 - H. B. Kaplan A1 - A. Kyprianidis A1 - R. Lundgren A1 - W. Morong A1 - S. Whitsitt A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - C. Monroe AB -

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

UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11117 ER -