Cold atoms meet lattice gauge theory

TL;DR

This review explores how replacing fermions with bosons in lattice gauge theories enhances experimental accessibility and reveals new physics, focusing on atomic simulators for particle physics models and their potential for experimental realization.

Contribution

It introduces bosonic lattice gauge models and discusses their experimental implementation as quantum simulators for fundamental particle physics theories.

Findings

Bosonic models provide new insights into confinement and deconfinement transitions.

Atomic simulators can emulate complex particle physics models like the Schwinger and Wilson-Hubbard models.

Experimental designs for accessible quantum simulators are proposed.

Abstract

The central idea of this review is to consider quantum field theory models relevant for particle physics and replace the fermionic matter in these models by a bosonic one. This is mostly motivated by the fact that bosons are more ``accessible'' and easier to manipulate for experimentalists, but this ``substitution'' also leads to new physics and novel phenomena. It allows us to gain new information about among other things confinement and the dynamics of the deconfinement transition. We will thus consider bosons in dynamical lattices corresponding to the bosonic Schwinger or Z$_2$ Bose-Hubbard models. Another central idea of this review concerns atomic simulators of paradigmatic models of particle physics theory such as the Creutz-Hubbard ladder, or Gross-Neveu-Wilson and Wilson-Hubbard models. Finally, we will briefly describe our efforts to design experimentally friendly simulators of these and other models relevant for particle physics.