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arXiv:2310.02320 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Dynamical deconfinement transition driven by density of excitations

Nishan Ranabhat, Alessandro Santini, Emanuele Tirrito, Mario Collura

Published Jan 8, 2025• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate the dynamical deconfinement transition driven by excitations in a long-range Ising model. At low temperatures, spatially separated pairs of domain wall kinks are bound by the confining potential and exhibit uncorrelated Bloch oscillations in time. This picture is analogous to bound mesons in quark confinement. As the temperature increases, the meson picture breaks down as the domain wall kinks in proximity interact and disperse, leading to an extended deconfined regime. In this paper, we characterize the deconfinement transition with signatures observed in the average density of domain wall kinks and nonequilibrium changes in its fluctuation. Our findings provide insights into the mechanisms of confinement and deconfinement in long-range spin models, thus opening avenues for further exploration and experimental verification.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.111.024304

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We investigate the dynamical deconfinement transition driven by excitations in a long-range Ising model. At low temperatures, spatially separated pairs of domain wall kinks are bound by the confining potential and exhibit uncorrelated Bloch oscillations in time. This picture is analogous to bound mesons in quark confinement. As the temperature increases, the meson picture breaks down as the domain wall kinks in proximity interact and disperse, leading to an extended deconfined regime. In this paper, we characterize the deconfinement transition with signatures observed in the average density of domain wall kinks and nonequilibrium changes in its fluctuation. Our findings provide insights into the mechanisms of confinement and deconfinement in long-range spin models, thus opening avenues for further exploration and experimental verification.
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We investigate the interplay between confinement and Krylov complexity in the long-range transverse-field Ising chain, where power-law interactions ∼1/rα\sim 1/r^α∼1/rα generate an effective confining potential between domain walls without an explicit symmetry-breaking field. Using the time-averaged Krylov state complexity after a quench as a diagnostic, we find that the complexity is strongly suppressed and only weakly system size-dependent at small ααα and small transverse field hxh_xhx​, where confinement is strongest, and crosses over to rapid growth at larger ααα, where it increases with system size. Within the confined regime, the oscillation frequencies of the complexity agree with the meson masses of an effective two-kink model, with the dominant frequency growing linearly with the lightest meson mass and the time-averaged complexity decreasing approximately as its inverse square. We further study operator Krylov complexity at finite temperature using the Wightman inner product. At low temperature, it exhibits bounded oscillations that directly encode the meson spectrum, whereas this structure is progressively washed out as the temperature increases. These results identify Krylov complexity as a spectroscopic probe of interaction-induced confinement and reproduce, in a microscopic lattice model, the hallmarks of Krylov complexity identified in confining field theories.
In a spontaneously dimerized quantum antiferromagnet, spin-1/2 excitations (spinons) are confined in pairs by strings akin to those confining quarks in non-Abelian gauge theories. The system has multiple degenerate ground states (vacua) and domain walls between regions of different vacua. For two vacua, we demonstrate that spinons on a domain wall are liberated, in a mechanism strikingly similar to domain-wall deconfinement of quarks in variants of quantum chromodynamics. This observation not only establishes a novel phenomenon in quantum magnetism, but also provides a new direct link between particle physics and condensed-matter physics. The analogy opens doors to improving our understanding of particle confinement and deconfinement by computational and experimental studies in quantum magnetism.
We investigate domain wall confinement and deconfinement through quantum simulation of an effective low-energy Hamiltonian describing the relative motion of a domain wall pair. By mapping the problem onto a discretized Pöschl-Teller potential. Confinement, partial confinement and deconfinement regimes are identified via spatial variance and local probability observables. The close agreement between exact numeric and ideal quantum simulation highlights the emergent single particle description of domain wall physics. Experiments on IBM quantum hardware expose the role of noise and finite-depth dynamics in near-term simulations of non-equilibrium many-body phenomena.
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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.