Simulating Compact Quantum Electrodynamics with ultracold atoms: Probing confinement and nonperturbative effects

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new method using atoms in optical lattices to simulate compact Quantum Electrodynamics, enabling exploration of confinement and nonperturbative phenomena in 2+1 dimensions.

Contribution

It introduces an alternative approach with atoms carrying multiple internal levels that rapidly converges to cQED, allowing detailed simulation of confinement effects.

Findings

Method effectively simulates confinement between static charges.

Approach works in both weak and strong coupling regimes.

Explicit construction demonstrated for l=1 case.

Abstract

Recently, there has been much interest in simulating quantum field theory effects of matter and gauge fields. In a recent work [Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 275301 (2011)] a method for simulating compact Quantum Electrodynamics (cQED) using Bose-Einstein condensates has been suggested. We suggest an alternative approach, which relies on single atoms in an optical lattice, carrying 2l+1 internal levels, which converges rapidly to cQED as l increases. That enables the simulation of cQED in 2+1 dimensions in both the weak and the strong coupling regimes, hence allowing to probe confinement as well as other nonperturbative effects of the theory. We provide an explicit construction for the case l=1 which is sufficient for simulating the effect of confinement between two external static charges.