Confined Dynamics of a Linear Spin Chain After a Quench using a Trapped Ion Quantum Simulator

Trapped-ion quantum simulators are pristine quantum platforms to investigate out-of-equilibrium many-body systems. Here we report an experimental study of the dynamics in a transverse field Ising model with tunable long range interactions after a quantum quench [1, 2]. We observe a regime in which the spreading of correlations is bounded and the magnetization dynamics is a direct probe of~low energy quasi-particle excitation~confinement [3].~The experiment is explained using a `two kink' model, which considers a linear spin chain with only two domain walls [4]. We plan to extend this experiment by looking directly at spin correlation propagation and to look at finite size scaling effects by performing the experiment with longer ion chains. [1] P. Richerme, et al, \textit{Nature}~\textbf{volume511},~pages198--201~(10 July 2014) [2] J. Zhang, et al,\textit{ Nature}~\textbf{volume551},~pages601--604~(30 November 2017) [3] M. Kormos, et al,\textit{ Nature Physics}~\textbf{volume13},~pages246--249~(2017) [4] F. Liu, et al, arXiv:1810.02365