Confinement in the Bulk, Deconfinement on the Wall: Infrared Equivalence between Compactified QCD and Quantum Magnets

Tin Sulejmanpasic, Hui Shao, Anders W. Sandvik, and Mithat Ünsal

Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 091601 – Published 1 September 2017

Abstract

In a spontaneously dimerized quantum antiferromagnet, spin- $1 / 2$ excitations (spinons) are confined in pairs by strings akin to those confining quarks in non-Abelian gauge theories. The system has multiple degenerate ground states (vacua) and domain walls between regions of different vacua. For two vacua, we demonstrate that spinons on a domain wall are liberated, in a mechanism strikingly similar to domain-wall deconfinement of quarks in variants of quantum chromodynamics. This observation not only establishes a novel phenomenon in quantum magnetism, but also provides a new direct link between particle physics and condensed-matter physics. The analogy opens doors to improving our understanding of particle confinement and deconfinement by computational and experimental studies in quantum magnetism.

Received 5 December 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.091601

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Confinement Domain walls Fractionalization Spinon Surface states

Antiferromagnets Quarks

Nuclear PhysicsInterdisciplinary PhysicsParticles & FieldsStatistical Physics & ThermodynamicsCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Tin Sulejmanpasic^1,2,*, Hui Shao^3,4,†, Anders W. Sandvik⁴, and Mithat Ünsal²

¹Philippe Meyer Institute, Physics Department, École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, 24 rue Lhomond, F-75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
²Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA
³Beijing Computational Science Research Center, Beijing 100193, China
⁴Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA