This work explores the qualitative dynamics of false vacuum decay in two dimensions, focusing on its realization through quantum annealing. Theoretical foundations are outlined and mapped onto quantum hardware, with several encoding strategies evaluated. Among these, the coupled domain wall encoding emerges as the most efficient, minimizing qubit usage while maintaining distance and rotational symmetries crucial for faithful modeling on a QPU. The study also addresses fidelity concerns: instead of the expected uniform distribution in the absence of an encoded potential, the coupled domain wall representation exhibited a bias toward anti-ferromagnetic states, which can be attributed to coupler imperfections. To mitigate this, techniques such as shimming and spin-reversal transformations were tested. Spin-reversal transformations proved to be most effective, both reducing variance as well as eliminating bias without requiring additional corrective iterations, thus offering a lightweight error-mitigation scheme. Building on this foundation, the decay process was simulated using modified Pöschl-Teller potentials combined with a local and global minimum. The results qualitatively reproduced the exponential decay, depending on the distance between the minima, in agreement with semiclassical quantum field theory.
Daniil Teplitskiy (Wed,) studied this question.