No Arabic abstract
Quantum simulators hold the promise of probing central questions of high-energy physics in tunable condensed matter platforms, for instance the physics of confinement. Local defects can be an obstacle in these setups harming their simulation capabilities. However, defects in the form of impurities can also be useful as probes of many-body correlations and may lead to fascinating new phenomena themselves. Here, we investigate the interplay between impurity and confinement physics in a basic spin chain setup, showing the emergence of new exotic excitations as impurity-meson bound states with a long lifetime. For weak confinement, semiclassical approximations can describe the capture process in a meson-impurity scattering event. In the strong-confining regime, intrinsic quantum effects are visible through the quantization of the emergent bound state energies which can be readily probed in quantum simulators.
Quantum many-body systems may defy thermalization even without disorder. Intriguingly, non-ergodicity may be caused by a fragmentation of the many-body Hilbert-space into dynamically disconnected subspaces. The tilted one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model was proposed as a platform to realize fragmented models perturbatively in the limit of large tilt. Here, we demonstrate the validity of this effective description for the transient dynamics using ultracold fermions. The effective analytic model allows for a detailed understanding of the emergent microscopic processes, which in our case exhibit a pronounced doublon-number dependence. We study this experimentally by tuning the doublon fraction in the initial state.
Rydberg atoms in optical tweezer arrays provide a playground for nonequilibrium quantum many-body physics. The PXP model describes the dynamics of such systems in the strongly interacting Rydberg blockade regime and notably exhibits weakly nonergodic dynamics due to quantum many-body scars. Here, we study the PXP model in a strong staggered external field, which has been proposed to manifest quasiparticle confinement in light of a mapping to a lattice gauge theory. We characterize this confining regime using both numerical exact diagonalization and perturbation theory around the strong-field limit. In addition to the expected emergent symmetry generated by the staggered field, we find a second emergent symmetry that is special to the PXP model. The interplay between these emergent symmetries and the Rydberg blockade constraint dramatically slows down the systems dynamics beyond naive expectations. We devise a nested Schrieffer-Wolff perturbation theory to properly account for the new emergent symmetry and show that this treatment is essential to understand the numerically observed relaxation time scales. We also discuss connections to Hilbert space fragmentation and trace the origin of the new emergent symmetry to a nearly-$SU(2)$ algebra discovered in the context of many-body scarring.
We study the effect of strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC) on bound states induced by impurities in superconductors. The presence of spin-orbit coupling breaks the $mathbb{SU}(2)$-spin symmetry and causes the superconducting order parameter to have generically both singlet (s-wave) and triplet (p-wave) components. We find that in the presence of SOC the spectrum of Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) states is qualitatively different in s-wave and p-wave superconductor, a fact that can be used to identify the superconducting pairing symmetry of the host system. We also predict that in the presence of SOC the spectrum of the impurity-induced bound states depends on the orientation of the magnetic moment $bf{S}$ of the impurity and, in particular, that by changing the orientation of $bf{S}$ the fermion-parity of the lowest energy bound state can be tuned. We then study the case of a dimer of magnetic impurities and show that in this case the YSR spectrum for a p-wave superconductor is qualitatively very different from the one for an s-wave superconductor even in the limit of vanishing SOC. Our predictions can be used to distinguish the symmetry of the order parameter and have implications for the Majorana proposals based on chains of magnetic atoms placed on the surface of superconductors with strong spin-orbit coupling.
The thermalization of isolated quantum many-body systems is deeply related to fundamental questions of quantum information theory. While integrable or many-body localized systems display non-ergodic behavior due to extensively many conserved quantities, recent theoretical studies have identified a rich variety of more exotic phenomena in between these two extreme limits. The tilted one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model, which is readily accessible in experiments with ultracold atoms, emerged as an intriguing playground to study non-ergodic behavior in a clean disorder-free system. While non-ergodic behavior was established theoretically in certain limiting cases, there is no complete understanding of the complex thermalization properties of this model. In this work, we experimentally study the relaxation of an initial charge-density wave and find a remarkably long-lived initial-state memory over a wide range of parameters. Our observations are well reproduced by numerical simulations of a clean system. Using analytical calculations we further provide a detailed microscopic understanding of this behavior, which can be attributed to emergent kinetic constraints.
We consider the 1d interacting Bose gas in the presence of time-dependent and spatially inhomogeneous contact interactions. Within its attractive phase, the gas allows for bound states of an arbitrary number of particles, which are eventually populated if the system is dynamically driven from the repulsive to the attractive regime. Building on the framework of Generalized Hydrodynamics, we analytically determine the formation of bound states in the limit of adiabatic changes in the interactions. Our results are valid for arbitrary initial thermal states and, more generally, Generalized Gibbs Ensembles.