Spinons are elementary excitations at the core of frustrated quantum magnets. Although it is well established that a pair of spinons can emerge from a magnon via deconfinement, controlled manipulation of individual spinons and direct observation of their deconfinement remain elusive. We propose an artificial gauge field scenario that enables the engineering of specific excited states in quantum spin models. This generates spatially localized individual spinons with high controllability. By applying time-dependent gauge fields, we realize adiabatic braiding of these spinons, as well as their dynamical evolution in a controllable manner. These results not only provide the first direct visualization of individual spinons localized in the bulk, but also point to new possibilities to simulate their confinement process. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our scenario in Rydberg atoms, which suggests an experimentally viable direction-gauge-field engineering of correlated phenomena in excited states.

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• Magnons
• Spinon
• Synthetic gauge fields
• Magnetic insulators
• Topological insulators
• Density matrix renormalization group
• Linear spin wave theory