An international research collaboration led by Duke Quantum Center has successfully used a trapped-ion quantum simulator to observe string breaking dynamics, a process in which two connected particles are pulled apart until sufficient energy accumulates for new particles to form. The work was published on September 23 in Nature Physics and represents one of the earliest demonstrations of this phenomenon in quantum physics research.
String breaking occurs when quarks, among the most fundamental building blocks of matter, are separated. Normally, quarks remain tightly bound together and cannot be isolated directly. The process can be visualized as two charged particles connected by a stretched string; as they are pulled apart, energy accumulates in the connection. When enough energy builds up, new particle pairs can effectively materialize, described colloquially as particles “popping into existence.” Such processes typically require extreme energy conditions found only in facilities like the Large Hadron Collider or in the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.
The researchers encoded a string breaking model into a chain of 13 trapped ions and used precisely controlled laser beams to adjust how the ions interacted with one another. This allowed the team to reproduce the stretching and eventual breaking of a string-like particle connection. The system was prepared in an out-of-equilibrium state, and researchers tracked how it evolved over time, detecting the appearance of effective charges and reconstructing the dynamics of the simulated string breaking process.
To validate their findings, the team modeled the same process using classical computers, and the results from both approaches agreed. While classical computers can still perform calculations at this scale, quantum computers are expected to surpass supercomputers’ capabilities as experiments become larger and more complex. Separate research groups using different quantum hardware platforms—superconducting circuits and neutral atoms—have recently achieved similar milestones, providing useful benchmarks for the quantum computing community.
The research, supported by multiple federal agencies including the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, represents progress toward quantum simulations too intricate for conventional supercomputers and could eventually enable investigations into matter’s behavior in the early universe.
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