IQIM Postdoctoral and Graduate Student Seminar

Friday, May 8, 2020

11:00am to 12:00pm

Online Event

Simulating the collapse of false-vacuum bubbles in spin chains

Ash Milsted, IQIM Postdoctoral Scholar, Preskill Group,

Abstract: It is possible that we live close to a local energetic minimum of the Standard Model, with an ever-present chance of catastrophic decay to the true minimum. We study the real-time collapse of a small bubble of false vacuum, on a true-vacuum background, in the vastly simpler setting of 1+1-dimensional spin chains, which nevertheless can capture key aspects if the physics involved. We construct spatially localized false-vacuum bubbles using an infinite Matrix Product State ansatz and simulate their time evolution, demonstrating inelastic scattering when the walls of the bubbles collide in an Ising-like chain. In contrast, the simplest candidate model -- the unmodified transverse-field Ising model with a small longitudinal field -- is seen to exhibit only elastic scattering, so that false-vacuum bubbles merely bounce back after collapsing.

Attend the talk at: https://caltech.zoom.us/j/97280252054

Talks will also be posted on IQIM's YouTube page https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5TeDDv2O31r8B47iEUEgNQ

For more information, please contact Marcia Brown by phone at 626-395-4013 or by email at marciab@caltech.edu.

Event Series

IQIM Postdoctoral and Graduate Student Seminar Series

Event Sponsors

Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) More Events from this Sponsor