Quenches and confinement in a Heisenberg–Ising spin ladder

Abstract

Abstract We consider the quantum quench dynamics of a Heisenberg–Ising spin ladder which is an archetypal model in which confinement of elementary excitations is triggered by internal interactions rather than an external field. We show that the confinement strongly affects the light cone structure of correlation functions providing signatures of the velocities of the mesons of the model. We also show that the meson masses can be measured from the real time analysis of the evolution of the order parameter.