Abstract
Simulating real-time evolution in theories of fundamental interactions represents one of the central challenges in contemporary theoretical physics. Cold-atom platforms stand as promising candidates to realize quantum simulations of non-perturbative phenomena in gauge theories, such as vacuum decay and hadron collisions, in prohibitive conditions for direct experiments. In this work, we demonstrate that present-day quantum simulators can imitate linear particle accelerators, giving access to S-matrix measurements of elastic and inelastic meson collisions in low-dimensional abelian gauge theories. Considering for definiteness a (1 + 1)-dimensional -lattice gauge theory realizable with Rydberg-atom arrays, we present protocols to observe and measure selected meson–meson scattering processes. We provide a benchmark theoretical study of scattering amplitudes in the regime of large fermion mass, including an exact solution valid for arbitrary coupling strength. This allows us to discuss the occurrence of inelastic scattering channels, featuring the production of new mesons with different internal structures. We present numerical simulations of realistic wavepacket collisions, which reproduce the predicted cross section peaks. This work highlights the potential of quantum simulations to give unprecedented access to real-time scattering dynamics.
Highlights
While implementing fault-tolerant quantum computations still requires significant technological advances, highly controllable quantum devices with hundreds of qubits are already being realized in various experimental platforms [1]
Considering for definiteness a (1 + 1)-dimensional Z2-lattice gauge theory realizable with Rydberg-atom arrays, we present protocols to observe and measure selected meson-meson scattering processes
Certain aspects of the physics of vacuum decay have been explored with trapped ions [15] and Rydberg atom arrays [16, 17]
Summary
While implementing fault-tolerant quantum computations still requires significant technological advances, highly controllable quantum devices with hundreds of qubits are already being realized in various experimental platforms [1]. A challenging problem in high-energy physics is simulating collisions of complex composite particles. Real-time dynamics of variants of these models witnessed recent developments in both classical [21, 22] and quantum [17, 15, 14, 23] simulations, opening the door to investigations of the simplest instances of collisions between complex structured objects arising from confinement. We demonstrate that present-day quantum simulators allow to investigate selected meson collisions in 1 + 1-dimensional Abelian lattice gauge theories (LGTs), as sketched, mimicking scattering experiments with particle accelerators. In Appendix C and Appendix D we provide more details on the exact solution of the twoand four-fermion problem, i.e., on the spectra of mesons and their scattering amplitudes, in the limit of large fermion mass. In Appendix F we summarize and discuss the effects of having a finite fermion mass
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