The recent rapid experimental advancement in the engineering of quantum many-body systems opens the avenue to controlled studies of fundamental physics problems via digital or analog quantum simulations. Here, we systematically analyze the capability of analog ion traps to explore relativistic meson spectra on current devices. We focus on the $E_8$ quantum field theory regime, which arises due to longitudinal perturbations at the critical point of the transverse-field Ising model. As we show through exact numerics, for sufficiently strong long-range suppression in experimentally accessible spin chain models, absorption spectroscopy allows for the identification of the low-lying meson excitations with a good degree of accuracy even for small system sizes. Our proposal thus opens a way for probing salient features of quantum many-body systems reminiscent of meson properties in high-energy physics.

• Received 1 August 2021
• Accepted 9 February 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.105.022616

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

Published by the American Physical Society