Programmable Polaron Models and Tomography in Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulators
Abstract
Strong coupling between mobile charge carriers or excitons and lattice vibrations gives rise to polarons: quasiparticles formed by charge carriers dressed by a cloud of phonon excitations. Polaron formation determines transport properties of systems ranging from transition-metal oxides and organic semiconductors to light-harvesting complexes. In excitonic systems that admit a hard-core boson description, mapping the excitations to pseudospins provides a natural framework for studying polaron physics, including the nonperturbative regime in which hopping amplitudes, phonon energies, and coupling strengths are comparable. Here, we propose a trapped-ion blueprint for realizing spin-phonon Hamiltonians with programmable spatial coupling between excitation density and phonon displacements, encompassing local Holstein and long-range Fröhlich-type interactions. To access strongly dressed quasiparticles whose bare spectral weight is suppressed, we introduce displaced Green's functions implemented through spin-dependent phonon displacements. Their spectral response reveals the polaron band spectrum, including binding energies and phonon-excitation sidebands, while spatially resolved measurements probe the structure of the phonon dressing cloud, providing a route to polaron tomography. We further complement this spectroscopy with direct and ancilla-assisted measurements of spin-phonon correlations that track the coupled dynamics of the excitation and its environment. These approaches connect the emergent quasiparticle spectrum to the microscopic buildup of its dressing cloud, enabling controlled studies of how the spatial range of coupling shapes polaron formation and mobility.
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BibTeX
@misc{marijanovic2026programmable,
title = {{Programmable Polaron Models and Tomography in Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulators}},
author = {Filip Marijanovic and Utso Bhattacharya and Abhishek Menon and Visal So and Guido Pagano and Eugene Demler},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.18970},
eprint = {2610.18970},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18970},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Programmable Polaron Models and Tomography in Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulators
AU - Filip Marijanovic
AU - Utso Bhattacharya
AU - Abhishek Menon
AU - Visal So
AU - Guido Pagano
AU - Eugene Demler
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.18970
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18970
AB - Strong coupling between mobile charge carriers or excitons and lattice vibrations gives rise to polarons: quasiparticles formed by charge carriers dressed by a cloud of phonon excitations. Polaron formation determines transport properties of systems ranging from transition-metal oxides and organic semiconductors to light-harvesting complexes. In excitonic systems that admit a hard-core boson description, mapping the excitations to pseudospins provides a natural framework for studying polaron physics, including the nonperturbative regime in which hopping amplitudes, phonon energies, and coupling strengths are comparable. Here, we propose a trapped-ion blueprint for realizing spin-phonon Hamiltonians with programmable spatial coupling between excitation density and phonon displacements, encompassing local Holstein and long-range Fröhlich-type interactions. To access strongly dressed quasiparticles whose bare spectral weight is suppressed, we introduce displaced Green's functions implemented through spin-dependent phonon displacements. Their spectral response reveals the polaron band spectrum, including binding energies and phonon-excitation sidebands, while spatially resolved measurements probe the structure of the phonon dressing cloud, providing a route to polaron tomography. We further complement this spectroscopy with direct and ancilla-assisted measurements of spin-phonon correlations that track the coupled dynamics of the excitation and its environment. These approaches connect the emergent quasiparticle spectrum to the microscopic buildup of its dressing cloud, enabling controlled studies of how the spatial range of coupling shapes polaron formation and mobility.
ER -