The universe on a table top: engineering quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a metastable vacuum

Fialko, O.; Opanchuk, Bogdan; Sidorov, Andrei; Drummond, P. D.; Brand, Joachim

doi:10.1088/1361-6455/50/2/024003

Cited by 36 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…For a detailed path integral derivation and additional details, the interested reader can refer to refs. [14][15][16]. Analogous results can also be obtained by working directly with the equations of motion.…”

Section: Effective Relativisitic Scalar Field Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…In this section, we have investigated the effects of Floquet instabilities arising in the analog false vacuum decay proposal of Fialko et al [14,15], which were originally pointed out in Braden et al [16]. The existence of these instabilities leads to a complete break- .…”

Section: Nonlinear Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…One proposal to build such a system uses a two-component dilute gas cold atom Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to simulate a relativistic scalar field with a false vacuum potential [14,15]. In this proposal, the false vacua are generated from unstable local maxima by periodically modulating the direct conversion between the two components.…”

Section: Contentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To ease comparison with previous work, here we also present the dimensionless units used in Fialko et al [14,15] and translate into the notation of our paper. To avoid notational confusion, we denote the various normalization constants of Fialko et al with superscript F and the corresponding dimensionless quantites by· F .…”

Section: B1 Comparison With Dimensionless Units Of Fialko Et Almentioning

confidence: 99%

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Nonlinear dynamics of the cold atom analog false vacuum

Braden

Johnson

Peiris

et al. 2019

J. High Energ. Phys.

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We investigate the nonlinear dynamics of cold atom systems that can in principle serve as quantum simulators of false vacuum decay. The analog false vacuum manifests as a metastable vacuum state for the relative phase in a two-species Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), induced by a driven periodic coupling between the two species. In the appropriate low energy limit, the evolution of the relative phase is approximately governed by a relativistic wave equation exhibiting true and false vacuum configurations. In previous work, a linear stability analysis identified exponentially growing short-wavelength modes driven by the time-dependent coupling. These modes threaten to destabilize the analog false vacuum. Here, we employ numerical simulations of the coupled Gross-Pitaevski equations (GPEs) to determine the non-linear evolution of these linearly unstable modes. We find that unless a physical mechanism modifies the GPE on short length scales, the analog false vacuum is indeed destabilized. We briefly discuss various physically expected corrections to the GPEs that may act to remove the exponentially unstable modes. To investigate the resulting dynamics in cases where such a removal mechanism exists, we implement a hard UV cutoff that excludes the unstable modes as a simple model for these corrections. We use this to study the range of phenomena arising from such a system. In particular, we show that by modulating the strength of the time-dependent coupling, it is possible to observe the crossover between a second and first order phase transition out of the false vacuum.

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Section: Effective Relativisitic Scalar Field Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Nonlinear Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Contentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B1 Comparison With Dimensionless Units Of Fialko Et Almentioning

confidence: 99%

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Nonlinear dynamics of the cold atom analog false vacuum

Braden

Johnson

Peiris

et al. 2019

J. High Energ. Phys.

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“…We refer to References [26,39,40] for a more detailed description of the model and a discussion of its physical relevance. It was shown in [26,27] to have an instability due to parametric resonance between the radio-frequency field and phonic perturbations.…”

Section: A the Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parametrized path approach to vacuum decay

Michel

2020

Phys. Rev. D

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We develop a new real-time approach to vacuum decay based on a reduction to a finite number of degrees of freedom. The dynamics is followed by solving a generalized Schrödinger equation. We first apply this method to a real scalar field in Minkowski space and compare the decay rate with that obtained by the instanton approach. The main difference is in the early-time dynamics, where the decay is faster due to the tail of the wave function. We then apply it to a cold atom model recently proposed to simulate vacuum decay experimentally. This approach will be extended to include gravity in a future work. * florent.c.michel@durham.ac.uk 1 If 0 is a typical potential scale, one may choose 0 ∼ 0 ∼ 0 ∕( ℏ) −1∕( +1) , where is the celerity of light. 2 after excluding the zero modes associated with translation invariance, which are taken into account by the first factor arXiv:1911.12765v1 [quant-ph]

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Towards the cold atom analog false vacuum

Braden

Johnson

Peiris

et al. 2018

J. High Energ. Phys.

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Analog condensed matter systems present an exciting opportunity to simulate early Universe models in table-top experiments. We consider a recent proposal for an analog condensed matter experiment to simulate the relativistic quantum decay of the false vacuum. In the proposed experiment, two ultra-cold condensates are coupled via a time-varying radio-frequency field. The relative phase of the two condensates in this system is approximately described by a relativistic scalar field with a potential possessing a series of false and true vacuum local minima. If the system is set up in a false vacuum, it would then decay to a true vacuum via quantum mechanical tunnelling. Should such an experiment be realized, it would be possible to answer a number of open questions regarding non-perturbative phenomena in quantum field theory and early Universe cosmology. In this paper, we illustrate a possible obstruction: the time-varying coupling that is invoked to create a false vacuum for the long-wavelength modes of the condensate leads to a destabilization of shorter wavelength modes within the system via parametric resonance. We focus on an idealized setup in which the two condensates have identical properties and identical background densities. Describing the system by the coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations (GPE), we use the machinery of Floquet theory to perform a linear stability analysis, calculating the wavenumber associated with the first instability band for a variety of experimental parameters. However, we demonstrate that, by tuning the frequency of the time-varying coupling, it may be possible to push the first instability band outside the validity of the GPE, where dissipative effects are expected to damp any instabilities. This provides a viable range of experimental parameters to perform analog experiments of false vacuum decay.

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The universe on a table top: engineering quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a metastable vacuum

Cited by 36 publications

References 57 publications

Nonlinear dynamics of the cold atom analog false vacuum

Nonlinear dynamics of the cold atom analog false vacuum

Parametrized path approach to vacuum decay

Towards the cold atom analog false vacuum

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