Dr. Jaka Vodeb from the Nanocenter presented at Qubits 2026, the annual conference organized by D-Wave Systems and held this year in Boca Raton, Florida.
The talk demonstrated how a programmable quantum annealer with over 5,000 superconducting flux qubits can serve as an experimental platform for studying false-vacuum decay—the transition from a metastable to a true vacuum state central to early-Universe cosmology.
By realizing a one-dimensional quantum Ising model with tunable longitudinal and transverse fields, the experiment enabled the observation and interaction of quantized true-vacuum bubbles, reproducing key features of non-perturbative dynamics known from quantum field theory.
The results highlight the expanding role of quantum annealers as powerful platforms for exploring non-equilibrium physics in large-scale many-body quantum systems.
Watch the full presentation here: https://youtu.be/ImKh8tHkzFc?si=ACzPP7cUW0m2usN2
