Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer

Vodeb, Jaka; Desaules, Jean-Yves Marc; Hallam, Andrew; Rava, Andrea; Humar, Gregor; Willsch, Dennis; Jin, Fengping; Willsch, Madita; Michielsen, Kristel; Papić, Zlatko

Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer

Vodeb J, Desaules J-YM, Hallam A, Rava A, Humar G, Willsch D, Jin F, Willsch M, Michielsen K, Papić Z. 2025. Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer. Nature Physics.

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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02765-w [Published Version]

DOI

10.1038/s41567-024-02765-w

Journal Article | Epub ahead of print | English

Scopus indexed

Author

Vodeb, Jaka; Desaules, Jean-Yves Marc^ISTA ; Hallam, Andrew; Rava, Andrea; Humar, Gregor; Willsch, Dennis; Jin, Fengping; Willsch, Madita; Michielsen, Kristel; Papić, Zlatko

Corresponding author has ISTA affiliation

Department

Serbyn Group

Grant

IST-BRIDGE: International postdoctoral program

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.

Publishing Year

2025

Date Published

2025-02-04

Journal Title

Nature Physics

Publisher

Springer Nature

Acknowledgement

J.V., D.W. and M.W. acknowledge support from the project Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ) that has received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. A.R. acknowledges support from the project HPCQS (101018180) of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). J.-Y.D., A.H. and Z.P. acknowledge support from the Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award RL-2019-015 and EPSRC grant nos. EP/R513258/1 and EP/W026848/1. J.-Y.D. acknowledges support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no.101034413. This research was supported in part by grant no. NSF PHY-2309135 to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP). Computational portions of this research work were carried out on ARC3 and ARC4, part of the high-performance computing facilities at the University of Leeds. G.H. acknowledges financial support from ARIS, P1-0040 Nonequilibrium Quantum System Dynamics. We gratefully acknowledge the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/ias/jsc) for funding this project by providing computing time on the D-Wave Advantage System JUPSI through JUNIQ. We acknowledge helpful theoretical discussions with G. Lagnese and the quantum-simulation-related discussions with D-Wave’s experimental team, particularly A. MacDonald, G. Poulin-Lamarre, A. Daian and A. Berkley. We also thank V. Goliber and A. Mason for patiently organizing and mediating the corresponding meetings that enabled the discussions with D-Wave’s team. J.V., A.R., D.W., F.J., M.W. and K.M. gratefully acknowledge the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. (www.gauss-centre.eu) for funding this project by providing computing time on the GCS Supercomputer JUWELS at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).

ISSN

1745-2473

eISSN

1745-2481

IST-REx-ID

19012

Cite this

Vodeb J, Desaules J-YM, Hallam A, et al. Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer. Nature Physics. 2025. doi:10.1038/s41567-024-02765-w

Vodeb, J., Desaules, J.-Y. M., Hallam, A., Rava, A., Humar, G., Willsch, D., … Papić, Z. (2025). Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer. Nature Physics. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02765-w

Vodeb, Jaka, Jean-Yves Marc Desaules, Andrew Hallam, Andrea Rava, Gregor Humar, Dennis Willsch, Fengping Jin, Madita Willsch, Kristel Michielsen, and Zlatko Papić. “Stirring the False Vacuum via Interacting Quantized Bubbles on a 5,564-Qubit Quantum Annealer.” Nature Physics. Springer Nature, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02765-w.

J. Vodeb et al., “Stirring the false vacuum via interacting quantized bubbles on a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer,” Nature Physics. Springer Nature, 2025.

Vodeb, Jaka, et al. “Stirring the False Vacuum via Interacting Quantized Bubbles on a 5,564-Qubit Quantum Annealer.” Nature Physics, Springer Nature, 2025, doi:10.1038/s41567-024-02765-w.

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