A team led by the Duke Quantum Center, working with several other universities, programmed a chain of 13 trapped ions to act like a stretched-out “string” connecting two building blocks of matter (think quarks). When the string is pulled far enough, it stores so much energy that it snaps, and a new particle and antiparticle appear at the break. The team watched this happen on their quantum device, and regular computer simulations confirmed the results were right.
This kind of process is tied to what happened in the extreme conditions right after the Big Bang. It is very hard to calculate on ordinary computers, which is why researchers want to use quantum devices to study it instead.
Why it matters: Instead of only building bigger particle colliders, physicists are starting to use quantum computers as a new kind of lab for the early universe. This experiment is small, but it shows the idea works. It also connects to what you can read in our antimatter lesson.