Boson-mediated quantum spin simulators in transverse fields: XY model and spin-boson entanglement

The coupling of spins to long-wavelength bosonic modes is a prominent means to engineer long-range spin-spin interactions, and has been realized in a variety of platforms, such as atoms in optical cavities and trapped ions. To date, much of the experimental focus has been on the realization of long-range Ising models, but generalizations to other spin models are highly desirable. In this work, we explore a previously unappreciated connection between the realization of an XY model by off-resonant driving of a single sideband of boson excitation (i. e., a single-beam Molmer-Sorensen scheme) and a boson-mediated Ising simulator in the presence of a transverse field. In particular, we show that these two schemes have the same effective Hamiltonian in suitably defined rotating frames, and analyze the emergent effective XY spin model through a truncated Magnus series and numerical simulations. In addition to XY spin-spin interactions that can be nonperturbatively renormalized from the naive Ising spin-spin coupling constants, we find an effective transverse field that is dependent on the thermal energy of the bosons, as well as other spin-boson couplings that cause spin-boson entanglement not to vanish at any time. In the case of a boson-mediated Ising simulator with transverse field, we discuss the crossover from transverse field Ising-like to XY-like spin behavior as a function of field strength.