Confinement and bound states of bound states in a transverse-field two-leg Ising ladder

Abstract

Weakly coupled Ising chains provide a condensed-matter realization of confinement. In these systems, kinks and antikinks bind into mesons due to an attractive interaction potential that increases linearly with the distance between the particles. While single mesons have been directly observed in experiments, the role of the multiparticle continuum and bound states of mesons in the excitation spectrum is far less clear. Using time-dependent density matrix renormalization group methods, we study the dynamical structure factors of one- and two-spin operators in a transverse-field two-leg Ising ladder in the ferromagnetic phase. The propagation of time-dependent correlations and the two-spin excitation spectrum reveal the existence of interchain bound states, which are absent in the one-spin dynamical structure factor. We also identify two-meson bound states that appear at higher energies, above the thresholds of several two-meson continua.