ABSTRACT:

In confining theories, separating two charges results in the generation of new charges that screen the original ones. This process, known as "string breaking'', prevents isolation of individual charges and is one of the fundamental phenomena in gauge theories such as quantum chromodynamics, as well as in simpler models exhibiting confinement.  In this talk, I will focus on the dynamics of string breaking in a trapped-ion quantum simulator. The breaking is observed as the string tension is gradually increased over time. As the system dynamically crosses the string-breaking point, becoming unstable, we demonstrate and characterize the nucleation of "bubbles" that break the string. 

BIO:

Federica Surace is an AWS Quantum Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, and a member of Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. She received her PhD in 2021 from Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA). She works at the intersection of condensed matter physics and quantum information, investigating the non-equilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems and the capabilities of quantum simulators.

Quantum systems with many strongly interacting particles are difficult to study with traditional techniques: because of the large computational cost, numerical simulations are typically limited to systems with a small number of components. A promising solution is to use other quantum systems ("quantum simulators"), that can be easily controlled in table-top experiments, and tune their parameters to mimic the properties of the model that we want to study. Federica’s research aims, in particular, at developing tools for simulating high-energy physics with quantum simulators and at understanding the emergence (or the absence) of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in quantum many-body systems.