The Lukin theory (sub)group wishes you a happy winter holidays! 🎄⚛️☃️

I thought by now I would be over these kinds of things, but I just saw mejillones en escabeche in a korean supermarket in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and 🥹🥹

*** cries in galician ***

Finally, we quench these string states and investigate the dynamics of string breaking.

We observe a high-order process where the initial string maximally breaks when it has the same energy as the broken string. We characterize this resonance through many-body spectroscopy.

Moreover, strings in (2+1)D can fluctuate between different shapes, and we indeed observe all of them in the states we prepare.

We map out the phase diagram of the gauge theory by preparing the ground state adiabatically.

We observe how, as we increase the Rydberg interactions (and thus the confining potential), the probability of the broken string dominates, signalling string breaking in equilibrium.

In the experiment, we can prepare and measure states corresponding to both unbroken and broken string configurations 👇

Here we encode a U(1) gauge theory in a Rydberg atom array, where atom configurations naturally map to particles and strings since:

1) The local (gauge) symmetry emerges from the Rydberg blockade.

2) Long-range Rydberg interactions give rise to a confining potential.

These new particles can be detected in particle accelerators, but string breaking was never observed directly. Moreover, simulating the dynamics of this process is very challenging.

Both problems can be overcome using quantum simulators with spatio-temporal resolution.

String breaking occurs in gauge theories such as quantum chromodynamics, where quarks are confined into composite objects (e.g. protons), connected by strings of gauge field.

When quarks are separated, the energy increases until new particles are created, breaking the string.

Finally, we quench these string states and investigate the dynamics of string breaking.

We observe a high-order process where the initial string maximally breaks when it has the same energy as the broken string. We characterize this resonance through many-body spectroscopy.

Moreover, strings in (2+1)D can fluctuate between different shapes, and we indeed observe all of them in the states we prepare.

Hello world! I thought I'd kick off my account here with a life update: I recently moved to Boston, where I will work in the Lukin group at Harvard as a Marie Curie fellow.

Let's keep the quantum discussion alive!