  False vacuum decay is a potential mechanism governing the evolution of the
early Universe, with profound connections to non-equilibrium quantum physics,
including quenched dynamics, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, and dynamical
metastability. The non-perturbative character of the false vacuum decay and the
scarcity of its experimental probes make the effect notoriously difficult to
study, with many basic open questions, such as how the bubbles of true vacuum
form, move and interact with each other. Here we utilize a quantum annealer
with 5564 superconducting flux qubits to directly observe quantized bubble
formation in real time -- the hallmark of false vacuum decay dynamics.
Moreover, we develop an effective model that describes the initial bubble
creation and subsequent interaction effects. We demonstrate that the effective
model remains accurate in the presence of dissipation, showing that our
annealer can access coherent scaling laws in driven many-body dynamics of 5564
qubits for over $1\mu$s, i.e., more than 1000 intrinsic qubit time units. This
work sets the stage for exploring late-time dynamics of the false vacuum at
computationally intractable system sizes, dimensionality, and topology in
quantum annealer platforms.
