Many-Body Dephasing in a Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulator

Understand

How a closed interacting quantum many-body system relaxes and dephases as a function of time is a fundamental question in thermodynamic and statistical physics.

• In this work, we analyse and observe the persistent temporal fluctuations after a quantum quench of a tunable long-range interacting transverse-field Ising Hamiltonian realized with a trapped-ion quantum simulator.
• We measure the temporal fluctuations in the average magnetization of a finite-size system of spin-$1/2$ particles.
• We experiment in a regime where the properties of the system are closely related to the integrable Hamiltonian with global spin-spin coupling, which enables analytical predictions even for the long-time non-integrable dynamics.