Real-time confinement following a quantum quench to a non-integrable model

TLDR: In this paper, the authors show that confinement has dramatic consequences for the non-equilibrium dynamics following a quantum quench and that these effects could be exploited as a quantitative probe of confinement.

Abstract: Confinement plays an important role in many-body physics from high energy to condensed matter. New results show that it strongly affects the non-equilibrium dynamics after a quantum quench with possible implications from ultracold atoms to QCD. Quarks cannot be observed as free particles in nature because they are confined into baryons and mesons, as a result of the fact that the strong interaction between them increases with their separation. However, it is less known that this phenomenon also occurs in condensed matter and statistical physics as experimentally proved in several quasi-1D compounds1,2. Most of the theoretical and experimental studies so far concentrated on understanding the consequences of confinement for the equilibrium physics of both high-energy and condensed matter systems. Here, instead we show that confinement has dramatic consequences for the non-equilibrium dynamics following a quantum quench and that these effects could be exploited as a quantitative probe of confinement.