Confinement and False Vacuum Decay in Quantum Spin Chains

Speaker : Dr. Gianluca Lagnese
Abstract : The confinement of elementary particles and the decay of the false vacuum are two paradigmatic predictions
of quantum field theory. In their simplest formulation, the two phenomena can be understood
as two facets of an underlying symmetry-breaking mechanism: the degeneracy of a double-degenerate
vacuum is lifted by adding an explicit symmetry-breaking external field. Confined states are false
vacuum bubbles within a true vacuum (the true ground state of the model); likewise, false vacuum
decay refers to the dissolution of the metastable vacuum through true vacuum bubbles nucleation via
quantum tunneling. The interest in this area of research has been recently revamped by the advances
in experimental techniques (e.g., in trapped ultracold atoms): confinement has already proved to be
accessible in condensed matter laboratory experiments while the direct laboratory study of the false
vacuum decay is promisingly within reach. Moreover, in the past few decades the out-of-equilibrium
dynamics of quantum many-body systems was promoted to the forefront of research in condensed
matter physics. I will present relevant investigations of such phenomena in the context of quantum
spin chain models through the observation of their real-time dynamics following a quantum quench
(the paradigmatic theoretical and experimental protocol for non-equilibrium dynamics).

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