Prethermalization and dynamical transition in an isolated trapped ion spin chain

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental scheme using trapped-ion quantum simulators to observe prethermalization and dynamical phase transitions in a one-dimensional XY spin chain with long-range interactions, revealing complex relaxation behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a feasible experimental setup to study prethermalization and dynamical transitions in long-range interacting spin chains with inhomogeneous spacing.

Findings

Local observables relax to prethermal values before thermalization.

Prethermalization is linked to a specific structure in the energy spectrum.

Dynamical phases change as the interaction range is tuned.

Abstract

We propose an experimental scheme to observe prethermalization and dynamical transition in one-dimensional XY spin chain with long range interaction and inhomogeneous lattice spacing, which can be readily implemented with the recently developed trapped-ion quantum simulator. Local physical observables are found to relax to prethermal values at intermediate time scale, followed by complete relaxation to thermal values at much longer time. The physical origin of prethermalization is explained by spotting a non-trivial structure in lower half of the energy spectrum. The dynamical behavior of the system is shown to cross difference phases when the interaction range is continuously tuned, indicating the existence of dynamical phase transition.