  Confinement is a process by which particles with fractional quantum numbers
bind together to form quasiparticles with integer quantum numbers. The
constituent particles are confined by an attractive interaction whose strength
increases with increasing particle separation and as a consequence, individual
particles are not found in isolation. This phenomenon is well known in particle
physics where quarks are confined in baryons and mesons. An analogous
phenomenon occurs in certain magnetic insulators; weakly coupled chains of
spins S=1/2. The collective excitations in these systems is spinons (S=1/2). At
low temperatures weak coupling between chains can induce an attractive
interaction between pairs of spinons that increases with their separation and
thus leads to confinement. In this paper, we employ inelastic neutron
scattering to investigate the spinon confinement in the quasi-1D S=1/2 XXZ
antiferromagnet SrCo2V2O8. Spinon excitations are observed above TN in
quantitative agreement with established theory. Below TN the pairs of spinons
are confined and two sequences of meson-like bound states with longitudinal and
transverse polarizations are observed. Several theoretical approaches are used
to explain the data. A new theoretical technique based on Tangent-space Matrix
Product States gives a very complete description of the data and provides good
agreement not only with the energies of the bound modes but also with their
intensities. We also successfully explained the effect of temperature on the
excitations including the experimentally observed thermally induced resonance
between longitudinal modes below TN ,and the transitions between thermally
excited spinon states above TN. In summary, our work establishes SrCo2V2O8 as a
beautiful paradigm for spinon confinement in a quasi-1D quantum magnet and
provides a comprehensive picture of this process.
