{"id":244495,"date":"2026-09-25T01:31:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T06:31:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/cosmic-lockdown-how-the-environment-can-isolate-quantum-fields"},"modified":"2026-09-25T01:31:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T06:31:51","slug":"cosmic-lockdown-how-the-environment-can-isolate-quantum-fields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/cosmic-lockdown-how-the-environment-can-isolate-quantum-fields","title":{"rendered":"Cosmic lockdown: How the environment can isolate quantum fields"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cosmic-lockdown-how-the-environment-can-isolate-quantum-fields2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A simplified cosmological model suggests that decoherence can suppress quantum tunneling, effectively locking fields into the vacuum state they have reached.<\/p>\n<p>The vacuum is not always so empty. \u201cWhen we talk about a vacuum in cosmology, we do not mean completely devoid of energy,\u201d explains David Wands, Professor at the Institute of Cosmology &amp; Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth. \u201cA vacuum is rather a state in which a field sits at a minimum of its energy. The true vacuum is the lowest possible minimum, but there can also be local minima, which we call false vacua.\u201d We can picture this as a landscape made up of valleys of different depths: the true vacuum is the deepest one, while the others are false vacua.<\/p>\n<p>Something sitting in one of these depressions can remain \u201ctrapped\u201d there even if, somewhere else, a lower-energy state exists. This is exactly what can happen to quantum fields, fundamental physical objects that permeate the universe. A classical field is something that has a value at every position in space, like a magnetic field, whose strength changes from point to point. Quantum fields behave in a similar way, and their excitations appear as particles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A simplified cosmological model suggests that decoherence can suppress quantum tunneling, effectively locking fields into the vacuum state they have reached. The vacuum is not always so empty. \u201cWhen we talk about a vacuum in cosmology, we do not mean completely devoid of energy,\u201d explains David Wands, Professor at the Institute of Cosmology &amp; Gravitation [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,47,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-neuroscience","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}