Accelerated observers emerging from a Bose-Einstein condensate through analogue gravity

Abstract

The current article explores the problem of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) trapped in an anisotropic three-dimensional harmonic-oscillator potential, with positive effective interatomic interactions, and the analogue gravity acoustic metric emerging from it. We find that the latter gives rise to a family of conformally equivalent metrics and the space-time interval corresponds to that of an accelerated observer subject to a position-dependent acceleration. Furthermore, such acceleration can be deduced differentiating the potential of the trap, which leads us to infer that, for a Bose-Einstein condensate in an arbitrary trap, the space-time interval will correspond to the conformal equivalent of that of an accelerated observer, being the acceleration in any direction proportional to the partial derivative of the trap potential of the BEC with respect to that coordinate. Finally, we compute the space-time interval, the Einstein tensor and the geodesic equations, identifying some of the Killing vectors, for three cases: the spherically symmetric, the axially symmetric and the asymmetric traps.

Comment on 'Accelerated observers emerging from a Bose-Einstein condensate through analogue gravity'

“…As far as the generalized form (21) of the approximated line-element (20) is concerned, it is worth noting that the spatial components of the acceleration are not g i , as the authors of [2] claim, but g i /(1 + 2g i ξ i ). Moreover, we stress that the line-elements (20) and (21) are curved, though the starting Rindler metric (18) was flat.…”