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In which kind of vacuum is our universe? Modern physics describes our universe as an intricate outcome of the interactions between particles and fields (the electromagnetic one, for example).
From a general point of view, our universe could be in a not so stable configuration, known as false vacuum, which has an energy higher than the absolute minimum. So, in principle it could decay to the lowest energy state, the true vacuum, triggered by quantum or thermal fluctuations. This process is strongly related to cosmological phenomena and the research community has dedicated great effort to understand in which kind of vacuum our universe is. Several research groups have developed sophisticated theories to describe this process, and, in the absence of a direct access to the conditions of the Big Bang, table top experimental platforms for testing and simulating these models have been devised. Today the first observation of this decay in a system of ultracold atoms is reported in a study published on Nature Physics by A. Zenesini et al. (link)
Keywords: Ultracold atoms, Quantum simulation, False vacuum decay