Fermion-antifermion scattering via boson exchange in a trapped ion

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an experimental quantum simulation of fermion-antifermion scattering mediated by bosonic modes using a trapped ion, capturing key quantum field theory phenomena like particle creation and self-energy interactions.

Contribution

It presents the first experimental realization of a quantum simulation of fermion-antifermion scattering in a trapped ion system, including nonperturbative effects.

Findings

Observation of particle pair creation and annihilation

Simulation of self-energy interactions

Implementation of fermionic and bosonic modes in a trapped ion

Abstract

Quantum field theories describe a wide variety of fundamental phenomena in physics. However, their study often involves cumbersome numerical simulations. Quantum simulators, on the other hand, may outperform classical computational capacities due to their potential scalability. Here, we report an experimental realization of a quantum simulation of fermion-antifermion scattering mediated by bosonic modes, using a multilevel trapped ion, which is a simplified model of fermion scattering in both perturbative and nonperturbative quantum electrodynamics. The simulated model exhibits prototypical features in quantum field theory including particle pair creation and annihilation, as well as self-energy interactions. These are experimentally observed by manipulating four internal levels of a $^{171}\mathrm{Yb}^{+}$ trapped ion, where we encode the fermionic modes, and two motional degrees of freedom that simulate the bosonic modes. Our experiment establishes an avenue towards the efficient implementation of fermionic and bosonic quantum field modes, which may prove useful in scalable studies of quantum field theories in perturbative and nonperturbative regimes.