2017/02/16 by Minoru Eto, Muneto Nitta · 46 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Bose–Einstein condensate #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Color confinement #Mechanics #Particle physics #Physics #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum chromodynamics #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Quark #Vortex #cond-mat.quant-gas #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.97.023613
published in Physical Review A 97(2) (American Physical Society) · 9 pages, 9 figures
arxiv created 2017/02/16 · openalex publication_date 2018/02/08 · arxiv updated 2018/02/14 · openalex created_date 2018/03/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We demonstrate that the confinement of half-quantized vortices (HQVs) in coherently coupled Bose-Einstein condensates simulates certain aspects of the confinement in a theory like SU(2) quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in 2+1 space-time dimensions. By identifying the circulation of superfluid velocity as the baryon number and the relative phase between two components as a dual gluon, we identify HQVs in a single component as electrically charged particles with a half baryon number. Further, we show that only singlet states of the relative phase of two components can stably exist as bound states of vortices, that is, a pair of vortices in each component (a baryon) and a pair of a vortex and an antivortex in the same component (a meson). We then study the dynamics of a baryon and meson; a baryon is static at equilibrium and rotates once it deviates from the equilibrium, while a meson moves with constant velocity. For both baryons and mesons we verify a linear confinement and determine that they are broken, thus creating other baryons or mesons in the middle when two constituent vortices are separated by more than some critical distance, resembling QCD.