  Quantum simulators hold the promise of probing central questions of
high-energy physics in tunable condensed matter platforms, for instance the
physics of confinement. Local defects can be an obstacle in these setups
harming their simulation capabilities. However, defects in the form of
impurities can also be useful as probes of many-body correlations and may lead
to fascinating new phenomena themselves. Here, we investigate the interplay
between impurity and confinement physics in a basic spin chain setup, showing
the emergence of new exotic excitations as impurity-meson bound states with a
long lifetime. For weak confinement, semiclassical approximations can describe
the capture process in a meson-impurity scattering event. In the
strong-confining regime, intrinsic quantum effects are visible through the
quantization of the emergent bound state energies which can be readily probed
in quantum simulators.
