Siva Darbha, Milan Kornjača, Fangli Liu, Jan Balewski, Mark R. Hirsbrunner, Pedro L. S. Lopes, Sheng-Tao Wang, Roel Van Beeumen, Katherine Klymko, and Daan Camps
Metastable states of quantum many-body systems with confinement offer a means to simulate false vacuum phenomenology, including non-equilibrium dynamical processes like decay by nucleation, in truncated limits. Recent work has examined false vacuum phenomena in 1D ferromagnetic Ising spins and superfluids. In this talk, we present work on metastability dynamics in 1D antiferromagnetic neutral atom chains with Rydberg interactions, using both numerical simulations and analytic modeling. We use a staggered local detuning field to achieve confinement. Our efforts focus on three dynamical regimes: decay, nucleation, and long-lived oscillations. In the first, we corroborate the phenomenological decay rate scaling and determine the associated parameter range for the decay process; in the second, we uncover and elucidate a procedure to anneal the metastable state from the initial to the final system, with intermediate nucleation events; in the third, we identify novel spectral signatures of quasiparticle oscillations distinct to antiferromagnetic neutral atom systems and interpret them using a classical energy model of short-range meson repulsion. We propose experimental protocols to prepare the required states and perform quenches on near-term neutral atom quantum simulators, examining the experimental feasibility of our proposed setup and parameter regime.
References:
[1] S. Darbha et al., arXiv:2404.12360 , (2024).
[2] S. Darbha et al., arXiv:2404.12371 , (2024).