English

Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5564-qubit quantum annealer

Quantum Physics 2025-02-05 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

False vacuum decay is a potential mechanism governing the evolution of the early Universe, with profound connections to non-equilibrium quantum physics, including quenched dynamics, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, and dynamical metastability. The non-perturbative character of the false vacuum decay and the scarcity of its experimental probes make the effect notoriously difficult to study, with many basic open questions, such as how the bubbles of true vacuum form, move and interact with each other. Here we utilize a quantum annealer with 5564 superconducting flux qubits to directly observe quantized bubble formation in real time -- the hallmark of false vacuum decay dynamics. Moreover, we develop an effective model that describes the initial bubble creation and subsequent interaction effects. We demonstrate that the effective model remains accurate in the presence of dissipation, showing that our annealer can access coherent scaling laws in driven many-body dynamics of 5564 qubits for over 1μ1\mus, i.e., more than 1000 intrinsic qubit time units. This work sets the stage for exploring late-time dynamics of the false vacuum at computationally intractable system sizes, dimensionality, and topology in quantum annealer platforms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.14718,
  title  = {Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5564-qubit quantum annealer},
  author = {Jaka Vodeb and Jean-Yves Desaules and Andrew Hallam and Andrea Rava and Gregor Humar and Dennis Willsch and Fengping Jin and Madita Willsch and Kristel Michielsen and Zlatko Papić},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.14718},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

12 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:14:04.279Z