%0 Journal Article %D 2019 %T Observation of Domain Wall Confinement and Dynamics in a Quantum Simulator %A W. L. Tan %A P. Becker %A F. Liu %A G. Pagano %A K. S. Collins %A A. De %A L. Feng %A H. B. Kaplan %A A. Kyprianidis %A R. Lundgren %A W. Morong %A S. Whitsitt %A Alexey V. Gorshkov %A C. Monroe %X

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

%8 12/23/2019 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11117