Speaker
Description
Understanding the nature of confinement, as well as its relation with the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, remains one of the long-standing questions in high-energy physics. The difficulty of these task stems from the limitations of current analytical and numerical techniques to address nonperturbative phenomena in non-Abelian gauge theories. The situation becomes particularly problematic when trying to analize the phase diagram of QCD at large Baryon densities, where a confinement-deconfinement transition between the hadronic and the quark-gluon plasma phases takes place. Recent progress with atomic quantum simulators indicates an alternative direction to overcome these limitations. In this talk, I will present two different approaches to address the physics of confinement using near-term quantum devices. In the first one, I will consider one of the simplest gauge theories in the presence of dynamical matter, and I will show how, using ideas drawn from topology, deconfinemened states can be prepared using less experimental resources [1]. In the second one, I will show how particle physics phenomenology emerges in even simpler models that do not possess gauge invariance [2], and are thus simpler to implement with atomic systems such as ultracold atoms in optical lattices. This would allow to study, for instance, confinement-deconfinement transitions and chiral symmetry restoration under controllable experimental conditions.
[1] Daniel González-Cuadra et al., Phys. Rev. X 10, 041007 (2020)
[2] Daniel González-Cuadra et al., PRX Quantum 1, 020321 (2020)
