Humar and Colleagues Models Resonant Domain Growth for Understanding Metastable States
Scientists have revealed a new regime where domain growth sharply exceeds nucleation in the dynamics of metastable states, a phenomenon central to diverse fields ranging from cosmology to quantum matter. Gregor Humar and colleagues at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), in collaboration with Technical University of Munich, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Italy’s National Institute, CENN Nanocenter, University of Leeds, Jozef Stefan Institute, National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), University of Cologne, University of Ljubljana, University of Padova, and Munich Centre for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST) utilised a 4000-qubit quantum annealer to model a two-dimensional quantum Ising model, demonstrating resonant expansion of true-vacuum domains. The findings establish a growth-dominated regime of false vacuum decay and highlight the potential of large-scale quantum simulation to explore nonequilibrium dynamics relevant to quantum field theory, cosmology, and strongly correlated matter. Quantum annealing simulates false vacuum decay via a two-dimensional Ising model The technique at the heart of this work employed a quantum annealer, a specialised computational device engineered to identify the lowest energy state of a given system, containing over 4000 qubits, the quantum analogue of classical bits. This substantial number of qubits facilitated the modelling of a two-dimensional quantum Ising model, a simplified yet powerful mathematical representation of interacting magnetic spins, conceptually similar to a grid of microscopic compass needles exerting influence upon one another. The Ising model serves as a valuable proxy for understanding more complex physical systems exhibiting phase transitions and collective behaviour. This approach allowed the researchers to simulate a false vacuum decay, a process describing the transition of a system from a metastable, seemingly stable state to a genuinely stable, lower-energy state. By observin
