  Systems with long-range interactions show a variety of intriguing properties:
they typically accommodate many meta-stable states, they can give rise to
spontaneous formation of supersolids, and they can lead to counterintuitive
thermodynamic behavior. However, the increased complexity that comes with
long-range interactions strongly hinders theoretical studies. This makes a
quantum simulator for long-range models highly desirable. Here, we show that a
chain of trapped ions can be used to quantum simulate a one-dimensional model
of hard-core bosons with dipolar off-site interaction and tunneling, equivalent
to a dipolar XXZ spin-1/2 chain. We explore the rich phase diagram of this
model in detail, employing perturbative mean-field theory, exact
diagonalization, and quasiexact numerical techniques (density-matrix
renormalization group and infinite time evolving block decimation). We find
that the complete devil's staircase -- an infinite sequence of crystal states
existing at vanishing tunneling -- spreads to a succession of lobes similar to
the Mott-lobes found in Bose--Hubbard models. Investigating the melting of
these crystal states at increased tunneling, we do not find (contrary to
similar two-dimensional models) clear indications of supersolid behavior in the
region around the melting transition. However, we find that inside the
insulating lobes there are quasi-long range (algebraic) correlations, opposed
to models with nearest-neighbor tunneling which show exponential decay of
correlations.
