Floquet-Rydberg quantum simulator for confinement in Z2 gauge theories

Abstract

Recent advances in the field of quantum technologies have opened up the road for the realization of small-scale quantum simulators of lattice gauge theories which, among other goals, aim at improving our understanding on the nonperturbative mechanisms underlying the confinement of quarks. In this work, considering periodically driven arrays of Rydberg atoms in a tweezer ladder geometry, we devise a scalable Floquet scheme for the quantum simulation of the real-time dynamics in a Z2 LGT, in which hardcore bosons/spinless fermions are coupled to dynamical gauge fields. Resorting to an external magnetic field to tune the angular dependence of the Rydberg dipolar interactions, and by a suitable tuning of the driving parameters, we manage to suppress the main gauge-violating terms and show that an observation of gauge-invariant confinement dynamics in the Floquet-Rydberg setup is at reach of current experimental techniques. Depending on the lattice size, we present a thorough numerical test of the validity of this scheme using either exact diagonalization or matrix-product-state algorithms for the periodically modulated real-time dynamics.