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. © 2024 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

We thank P. Castorina, P. Kitson, G. Marchegiani, P. Naldesi, F. Perciavalle, and J. Polo for discussions. A.B. acknowledges support from PID2021- 127726NB-I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE), from the Grant IFT Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa CEX2020-001007- S, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, from the CSIC Research Platform on Quantum Technologies PTI-001, from the MINECO through the QUANTUM ENIA project call - QUANTUM SPAIN project, and from the EU through the RTRP-NextGenerationEU within the framework of the Digital Spain 2025 Agenda.

Peer reviewed