A team led by physicist Christopher Monroe at the Duke Quantum Center, working with researchers from the University of Maryland, Oxford, Caltech, Cornell, and KU Leuven, used a 13-ion trapped-ion quantum simulator to recreate "string breaking" — a process in which two connected building blocks of matter are pulled apart until enough energy builds up to spontaneously create new particles.
String breaking normally occurs only in extreme conditions: high-energy particle collisions like those at the Large Hadron Collider, or in the hot, dense environment of the universe moments after the Big Bang. Classical supercomputers struggle to model the real-time dynamics of this process because the calculations grow prohibitively complex, but the trapped-ion quantum device tracked it directly, atom by atom.
The results, published in Nature Physics on September 23, mark one of the first experimental demonstrations of matter formation dynamics on a quantum computer. Monroe said the approach offers "the best platform to investigate complex questions like matter formation, short of having witnessed the big bang itself," and the team sees it as a step toward quantum machines that can tackle physics problems beyond the reach of classical computing.