False vacuum decay in Rydberg atom quantum simulators: Classical emulation over the parameter space

The expansion and cooling of the universe may have caused it to settle into a false vacuum state. A false vacuum would decay into the true vacuum through nucleation and potentially produce an observable signature. The phenomenon of false vacuum decay is difficult to probe in its field-theoretic form in physical cosmology, but it can be investigated more easily in analogue quantum simulators with strongly-coupled matter. Recent work has examined false vacuum decay in spin chains with the ferromagnetic Ising model and XXZ ladder, determining the relevant parameter range and quantifying the features of some important observables. We investigate false vacuum decay in Rydberg atom chains with the antiferromagnetic Rydberg Hamiltonian, using local detuning to achieve confinement and nucleation. We use classical emulation to examine the decay dynamics over a broad space of waveform inputs, notably studying the Neel order parameter. We constrain the parameter range for false vacuum decay and characterize the dynamics at the core and boundary of this regime.