Detecting a long lived false vacuum with quantum quenches

Abstract

Distinguishing whether a system supports alternate low-energy (locally stable) states -- stable (true vacuum) versus metastable (false vacuum) -- by direct observation can be difficult when the lifetime of the state is very long but otherwise unknown. Here we demonstrate, in a tractable model system, that there are physical phenomena on much shorter time scales that can diagnose the difference. Specifically, we study the time evolution of the magnetization following a quench in the tilted quantum Ising model, and show that its magnitude spectrum is an effective diagnostic. Small transition bubbles are more common than large ones, and we see characteristic differences in the size dependence of bubble lifetimes even well below the critical size for false vacuum decay. We expect this sort of behavior to be generic in systems of this kind. We show such signatures persist in a continuum field theory. This also opens the possibility of similar signatures of the potential metastable false vacuum of our universe well before the beginning of a decay process to the true vacuum.

8+8 pages, 3+3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5564-qubit quantum annealer
• Theory of metastable states in many-body quantum systems
• Dynamics of a Nonequilibrium Discontinuous Quantum Phase Transition in a Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Quantum simulating continuum field theories with large-spin lattice models
• String-Breaking Dynamics in Quantum Adiabatic and Diabatic Processes
• Probing False Vacuum Decay and Bubble Nucleation in a Rydberg Atom Array
• Confinement and false vacuum decay on the Potts quantum spin chain
• Resonant dynamics of spin cluster in a periodically driven one-dimensional Rydberg lattice
• Temperature driven false vacuum decay in coherently coupled Bose superfluids
• Apparent bistability from weak long-range interactions