Abstract
String breaking is a central dynamical process in theories featuring confinement, where a string connecting two charges decays at the expense of the creation of new particle-antiparticle pairs. Here, we show that this process can also be observed in quantum Ising chains where domain walls get confined either by a symmetry-breaking field or by long-range interactions. We find that string breaking occurs, in general, as a two-stage process. First, the initial charges remain essentially static and stable. The connecting string, however, can become a dynamical object. We develop an effective description of this motion, which we find is strongly constrained. In the second stage, which can be severely delayed due to these dynamical constraints, the string finally breaks. We observe that the associated timescale can depend crucially on the initial separation between domain walls and can grow by orders of magnitude by changing the distance by just a few lattice sites. We discuss how our results generalize to one-dimensional confining gauge theories and how they can be made accessible in quantum simulator experiments such as Rydberg atoms or trapped ions.
Highlights
Confining theories such as quantum chromodynamics have the defining property that two static charges, e.g., a heavy quark-antiquark pair, are connected by a flux tube or string, whose energy increases linearly with the separation [1]
Many aspects of confinement cannot only be realized in gauge theories, and in conventional quantum spin chains [26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45]. It has remained an open question whether quantum spin models can inherit the fundamental dynamical process of string breaking
We start by outlining our main results, which will be analyzed in more detail
Summary
Confining theories such as quantum chromodynamics have the defining property that two static charges, e.g., a heavy quark-antiquark pair, are connected by a flux tube or string, whose energy increases linearly with the separation [1]. The string can break as the creation of new, light particle-antiparticle pairs becomes more favourable [2,3,4,5] This mechanism is known as string breaking and has been investigated extensively from a static point of view [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] while recently its dynamics has gained increased attention [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]. The phenomenology of string breaking obtains a significantly broadened scope towards the realm of quantum many-body theory and brings it within reach of experiments in quantum simulators
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