False vacuum decay and nucleation dynamics in neutral atom systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the decay and annealing dynamics of metastable states in 1D neutral atom chains with Rydberg interactions, combining simulations, analytic models, and experimental proposals for quantum simulation of false vacuum phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed study of nucleation and decay processes in 1D antiferromagnetic neutral atom systems, including new analytic and numerical insights and experimental protocols.

Findings

Confirmed decay rate scaling in metastable states

Identified parameter regimes for decay and annealing

Proposed feasible experimental protocols for quantum simulation

Abstract

Metastable states of quantum many-body systems with confinement offer a means to simulate false vacuum phenomenology, including non-equilibrium dynamical processes like decay by nucleation, in truncated limits. Recent work has examined the decay process in 1D ferromagnetic Ising spins and superfluids. In this paper, we study nucleation dynamics in 1D antiferromagnetic neutral atom chains with Rydberg interactions, using both numerical simulations and analytic modeling. We apply a staggered local detuning field to generate the metastable and ground states. Our efforts focus on two dynamical regimes: decay and annealing. In the first, we corroborate the phenomenological decay rate scaling and determine the associated parameter range for the decay process; in the second, we uncover and elucidate a procedure to anneal the metastable state from the initial to the final system, with intermediate nucleation events. We further propose experimental protocols to prepare the required states and perform quenches on near-term neutral atom quantum simulators, examining the experimental feasibility of our proposed setup and parameter regime.