A Duke University-led team has used a trapped-ion quantum computer to simulate "string breaking," a fundamental process in which particles appear where none existed before. The work, reported in September 2026, points toward quantum simulations of physics that even the world's most powerful supercomputers cannot handle.
Simulating the Universe: Duke's "String Breaking" Breakthrough
String breaking describes how the connections between particles can snap and convert their energy into new particle-antiparticle pairs — matter, in effect, popping into existence. The Duke-led collaboration reproduced analogous string-breaking behavior on a trapped-ion quantum platform rather than observing it in a particle accelerator.
Quantum simulators suit this kind of work because researchers can precisely control them and program them to imitate physical processes at atomic and subatomic scales. The study drew on an international collaboration including the University of Maryland, Oxford University, Caltech, Cornell University and KU Leuven.
"Quantum computer simulations provide the best platform to investigate complex questions like matter formation, short of having witnessed the Big Bang itself," said Christopher Monroe, the Gilhuly Family Presidential Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Duke, who led the research. First author Arinjoy De, a former PhD student in Monroe's lab now at QuEra Computing, called working at the intersection of quantum simulation and high-energy physics "incredibly exciting."
Why Quantum Computers Excel at Simulating Quantum Systems
Why can't a bigger supercomputer simply do this job? The answer lies in how the two machines represent information. The framework below contrasts the two approaches on the dimensions that matter for simulating many-particle quantum systems.
| Dimension | Classical computers | Quantum computers |
|---|---|---|
| Computational unit | Bits that are either 0 or 1 | Qubits that can be 0, 1, or a superposition of both |
| State representation | Must describe superposition and entanglement through classical approximation | Use superposition and entanglement directly as native resources |
| Problem scaling | Processing power needed rises exponentially as particle count grows | Model quantum systems directly, avoiding that exponential overhead |
The consequence of that last row is the whole story. Because microscopic particles can exist in superpositions and become entangled with one another, the classical processing power needed to fully describe their interactions rises exponentially as particle numbers increase, as Physics World explained in its coverage of an earlier four-ion experiment. A quantum computer sidesteps the approximation problem: it is itself a quantum system, so it can directly model the physics rather than translate it into binary logic.
That earlier 2016 experiment, which used four calcium ions manipulated with lasers, produced a result still easily calculated on a conventional computer — but its designers noted that scaling to roughly 30 ions would push beyond supercomputers. The Duke result represents another step toward that threshold, and team member Zohreh Davoudi of the University of Maryland said it was "incredibly exciting to investigate the conditions of the early universe in an atomic-level computing machine."
