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

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 $1\mu$s, 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.

12 pages, 5 figures

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• Theory of metastable states in many-body quantum systems
• Constrained dynamics and confinement in the two-dimensional quantum Ising model
• Unraveling Reverse Annealing: A Study of D-Wave Quantum Annealers
• Understanding the physics of D-Wave annealers: From Schrödinger to Lindblad to Markovian Dynamics
• Probing False Vacuum Decay and Bubble Nucleation in a Rydberg Atom Array
• String-Breaking Dynamics in Quantum Adiabatic and Diabatic Processes
• Quantum Liang Information Flow Probe of Causality across Critical Points
• Apparent bistability from weak long-range interactions
• Temperature driven false vacuum decay in coherently coupled Bose superfluids