Luckily “false vacuum decay” would take millions of years to occur, if it happens at all.

• The universe could end not with a bang, but a whimper known as “false vacuum decay.”
• In a new study, scientists leveraged the power of a quantum computer to study the cosmic bubbles that would form if the universe transitioned to a true ground state.
• While death by this kind of quantum shenanigans is unlikely, the study is a powerful example of how quantum computers can help scientists probe questions previously thought impossible to study.

American poet Robert Frost famously pondered what version of the end times would be the most preferable: fire or ice. However, the world of quantum mechanics considers an even stranger and all-around more terrifying ending—a quantum process known as “false vacuum decay.”

First proposed by theoretical physicist Sidney Coleman in 1977, this idea suggests that the universe may be trapped in a false vacuum, meaning that it appears to be stable, but could transition to a true vacuum state at any time. This transition would fundamentally alter the structure of the universe, forming cosmic bubbles that alter the universe as they grow larger. Essentially, our known universe would disappear.

Considering the existential threat of “false vacuum decay,” a team of international scientists—led by experts at the University of Leeds in the U.K.—used a quantum machine called an annealer to simulate the creation of these cosmic bubbles as they formed. While this study pushes forward our understanding of quantum dynamics, it simultaneously served as a case study for research uses of emerging quantum computers. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Physics.

“We’re talking about a process by which the universe would completely change its structure,” Zlatko Papic, the lead author of the study from the University of Leeds, said in a press statement. “The fundamental constants could instantaneously change and the world as we know it would collapse like a house of cards. What we really need are controlled experiments to observe this process and determine its time scales.”

Although scientists knew about false vacuum decay, they didn’t quite understand its mechanism. To answer this question, they turned to a 5564-bit quantum computer constructed by D-Wave Quantum Inc. (headquartered in both the U.S. and Canada). The team explains that the bubbles behave similarly to bubbles that form in water vapor, cooled beyond their dew point. With the help of the quantum annealer, scientists were able to observe the behavior of these bubbles and how they form, interact, and grow over time in a one-dimensional model.

“This phenomenon is comparable to a rollercoaster that has several valleys along its trajectory but only one ‘true’ lowest state, at ground level,” Jean-Yves Desaules, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement. “If that is indeed the case, quantum mechanics would allow the universe to eventually tunnel to the lowest energy state or the ‘true’ vacuum and that process would result in a cataclysmic global event.”

Luckily, this change wouldn’t occur overnight, and would likely take untold millions of years—if it could actually happen at all. So, while Frost’s foreboding vision of the end times is way more likely than death by any kind of a universal quantum shenanigans, the ability to simulate the cosmic bubbles formed from “false vacuum decay” offers a brief, powerful glimpse of what quantum computers can do in the world of research.

“We are trying to develop systems where we can carry out simple experiments to study these sorts of things,” Papic said in a press statement. “The time scales for these processes happening in the universe are huge, but using the annealer allows us to observe them in real time, so we can actually see what's happening.”