Illustration from Scientific Research

Semiclassical energy landscape V as a function of magnetization M of a ferromagnetic Ising chain in transverse ( h x ) and longitudinal ( h z ) fields. The landscape exhibits a local metastable minimum dubbed as the false vacuum, represented by the polarized |↑↑…↑〉 state. The global minimum or true vacuum is the other polarized |↓↓…↓〉 state. The false vacuum decay unfolds via the creation of quantized true vacuum bubbles of size n , determined by the energy balance between the surface (4 J ) and volume (2 h z n ) energy contributions.

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