In an ion trap, several atoms suddenly produced new particles — as if the void itself had begun to give birth to matter. Scientists from Duke University and the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland made a quantum system imitate a process that occurs in the depths of colliders and in the first moments after the Big Bang.
A team led by Christopher Monroe used a trap of several ions to model the dynamics of string breaking. Two bound fundamental particles were stretched, accumulating energy, until the bond snapped and new particles appeared. The experiment is described in a paper published on 23 September 2026 in the journal Nature Physics.
The study was conducted jointly with colleagues from Oxford, the California Institute of Technology, Cornell and KU Leuven. This is already the third independent demonstration of the same phenomenon on different quantum platforms, but the first on an ion trap, which is especially well suited to modeling strong interactions.
Imagine two rubber threads stretched between two points: the harder they are pulled, the more energy accumulates in the middle. At some point the threads snap, and all the accumulated energy turns into new threads and new points. This is precisely how the quantum system reproduced the birth of matter out of "nothing" — without any external source of particles.
The results show that even small quantum devices are already capable of solving problems beyond the reach of classical supercomputers. They open the way to direct modeling of processes that occurred in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang and that until now have been studied only in giant accelerators.
According to Monroe, such simulations provide the best platform for studying the formation of matter, apart from the Big Bang itself. The work was carried out on real quantum hardware and passed peer review in a leading journal.
Quantum computers are beginning to become an instrument of fundamental physics, and not only of computing technology.
