Federica Surace
The decay of the false vacuum has been a central theme in many areas of physics, from the theory of ferromagnetism to fundamental interactions and the early Universe. In this talk, I will show that false vacuum decay is accessible to current quantum simulators. The simulated models are spin chains with confinement of the elementary excitations. The false vacuum is the metastable state that arises in the ferromagnetic phase of the model when the symmetry is explicitly broken by a longitudinal field. This state decays through the formation of "bubbles" of true vacuum. We find that the numerical results agree with the theoretical prediction that the decay rate is exponentially small in the inverse of the longitudinal field.