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arXiv · 2406.08094

Cosmological particle production in a quantum field simulator as a quantum mechanical scattering problem

Christian F. Schmidt·Álvaro Parra-López·Mireia Tolosa-Simeón·Marius Sparn·Elinor Kath·Nikolas Liebster·Jelte Duchene·Helmut Strobel·Markus K. Oberthaler·Stefan Floerchinger
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Abstract

The production of quantum field excitations or particles in cosmological spacetimes is a hallmark prediction of curved quantum field theory. The generation of cosmological perturbations from quantum fluctuations in the early universe constitutes an important application. The problem can be quantum-simulated in terms of structure formation in an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with time-dependent s-wave scattering length. Here, we explore a mapping between cosmological particle production in general (D+1)-dimensional spacetimes and scattering problems described by the non-relativistic stationary Schr\"odinger equation in one dimension. Through this mapping, intuitive explanations for emergent spatial structures in both the BEC and the cosmological system can be obtained for a large class of analogue cosmological scenarios, ranging from power-law expansions to periodic modulations. The investigated cosmologies and their scattering analogues are tuned to be implemented in a (2+1)-dimensional quantum field simulator.

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Christian F. Schmidt, Álvaro Parra-López, Mireia Tolosa-Simeón, Marius Sparn, Elinor Kath, Nikolas Liebster, Jelte Duchene, Helmut Strobel, Markus K. Oberthaler, Stefan Floerchinger. 2024-06-12. Cosmological particle production in a quantum field simulator as a quantum mechanical scattering problem. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.110.123523

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