Dr. Jaka Vodeb presented his research at Qubits 2026, the annual quantum computing conference organized by D-Wave Systems and held this year in Boca Raton, Florida.
In his talk, he addressed false-vacuum decay—the transition from a metastable to a true vacuum state—a process central to early-Universe cosmology and inherently challenging to study experimentally due to its non-perturbative nature.
Using a programmable quantum annealer with more than 5,000 superconducting flux qubits, the team implemented a one-dimensional quantum Ising model with tunable fields. The experiment enabled the observation of quantized true-vacuum bubbles and reproduced key features of the decay process, including scaling laws and emergent kinetic constraints analogous to those known from quantum field theory.
These results further demonstrate the potential of quantum annealers as experimental platforms for exploring non-equilibrium dynamics in large many-body quantum systems.
The recording of the talk is available here: https://youtu.be/ImKh8tHkzFc?si=ACzPP7cUW0m2usN2