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Understanding the nature of confinement, as well as its relation with thespontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, remains one of the long-standingquestions in high-energy physics. The difficulty of this task stems from thelimitations of current analytical and numerical techniques to addressnon-perturbative phenomena in non-Abelian gauge theories. In this work, we showhow similar phenomena emerge in simpler models, and how these can be furtherinvestigated using state-of-the-art cold-atom quantum simulators. Morespecifically, we introduce the rotor Jackiw-Rebbi model, a (1+1)-dimensionalquantum field theory where interactions between Dirac fermions are mediated byquantum rotors. Starting from a mixture of ultracold atoms in an opticallattice, we show how this quantum field theory emerges in the long-wavelengthlimit. For a wide and experimentally-relevant parameter regime, the Diracfermions acquire a dynamical mass via the spontaneous breakdown of chiralsymmetry. Moreover, we study the effect of both quantum and thermalfluctuations, which lead to the phenomenon of chiral symmetry restoration.Finally, we uncover a confinement-deconfinement quantum phase transition, wheremeson-like fermions fractionalise into quark-like quasi-particles bound totopological solitons of the rotor field. The proliferation of these solitons atfinite chemical potentials again serves to restore the chiral symmetry,yielding a clear analogy with the quark-gluon plasma in quantum chromodynamics,where this symmetry coexists with the deconfined fractional charges. Ourresults show how the interplay between these phenomena could be analyse inrealistic atomic experiments.

The rotor Jackiw-Rebbi model: a cold-atom approach to chiral symmetry restoration and quark confinement