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Vodeb, J. orcid.org/0000-0002-6193-3475, Desaules, J.-Y. orcid.org/0000-0002-3749-6375, Hallam, A. et al. (7 more authors) (2025) Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer. Nature Physics. ISSN 1745-2473
Abstract
False vacuum decay—the transition from a metastable quantum state to a true vacuum state—plays an important role in quantum field theory and non-equilibrium phenomena such as phase transitions and dynamical metastability. The non-perturbative nature of false vacuum decay and the limited experimental access to this process make it challenging to study, leaving several open questions regarding how true vacuum bubbles form, move and interact. Here we observe quantized bubble formation in real time, a key feature of false vacuum decay dynamics, using a quantum annealer with 5,564 superconducting flux qubits. We develop an effective model that captures both initial bubble creation and subsequent interactions, and remains accurate under dissipation. The annealer reveals coherent scaling laws in the driven many-body dynamics for more than 1,000 intrinsic qubit time units. This work provides a method for investigating false vacuum dynamics of large quantum systems in quantum annealers.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) > Theoretical Physics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 05 Nov 2024 11:37 |
Last Modified: | 18 Feb 2025 09:21 |
Published Version: | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-024-02765-w |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Nature Research |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41567-024-02765-w |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:218849 |
Available Versions of this Item
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Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5564-qubit quantum annealer. (deposited 24 Oct 2024 10:39)
- Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer. (deposited 05 Nov 2024 11:37) [Currently Displayed]