Sebastian Grieninger, University of Washington

In the massive Schwinger model, we study how a flux string connecting two static charges of opposite sign accumulates energy linearly with their separation distance. When the energy exceeds a critical threshold, the string breaks and produces a particle-antiparticle pair. We show that this system exhibits thermal-like behavior even in the static configuration, allowing us to assign it an effective temperature. We focus on quantum information measures to characterize the string breaking process: entanglement entropy and quantum magic. The latter is an emerging resource measure in quantum computation that quantifies how difficult a state is to simulate classically. These complementary probes offer new insights into the non-perturbative confinement mechanism in gauge theories.