Quantum Device Successfully Simulated Terrifying Way For The Universe To End

“While [quantum devices] are still being developed, the non-trivial question is to find a suitable problem to study on them. Something which is kind of difficult for classical computers but at the same time not too difficult so that these devices can still say something useful, you know, before they are fully optimized and so on,” lead author Professor Zlatko Papic, from the University of Leeds, told IFLScience.

Quantum devices use qubits (quantum bits), which allow computations to extend from the classical 0 and 1 options of bits. Papic and his group have used a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer to simulate a one-dimensional false vacuum decay, a possible scenario for the end of the universe (and my absolute favorite, if we are being honest).

In quantum mechanics, only fields that are at their lowest possible state (ground state or true vacuum) are truly stable. The rest can be metastable, which means they look stable but it can be possible for them to decay into the true stable state. This is known as the false vacuum decay.

If the universe’s Higgs field, for example, is not in its true vacuum state, it could spontaneously decay. This would create an expanding cosmic bubble that would change the universe as it gets larger, making our version of reality vanish. All of the universe would eventually disappear.

“One important question about vacuum decay is really how does that process happen? If you’re able to zoom in on it and watch it like a video, what is it that actually happens? The main goal of this paper was to try to understand what that underlying mechanism is,” Professor Papic told IFLScience.

Papic compared the process to the fun effect that happens in supercooled water, which one might have seen in videos such as the one below. The water is below freezing temperatures but stays liquid as long as it is undisturbed. Pouring it or hitting it causes it to nucleate and then the liquid becomes solid. False vacuum has some similarities in principle but the simulation revealed that this doomsday is a lot more complex.

“One thing we had not really anticipated was that this whole process is actually much more complicated than you might naively think or what people in the literature discussed,” Papic told IFLScience. “You get these bubbles of different sizes and their sizes actually affect how they interact with each other. There’s a very complicated process of how these bubbles are actually evolving and colliding and so on.”

The team now is planning to look at a two-dimensional version of the system, and they hope as technology progresses that they can create three-dimensional versions too. The reason why they didn’t start immediately on 2D is that they still had to validate the results using theoretical models. In 2D, you’ll have to trust the quantum device.

“There’s this great deal of excitement now that we have these new technologies and there is really a chance that we can answer some of these very difficult questions of fundamental physics using that technology,” Professor Papic explained. “This question is a very good example. I mean it’s been around for something like half a century and it’s known as a very difficult problem to answer with pen and paper. But with these new technologies, we might have a chance!”

A paper regarding this work is published in the journal Nature Physics.