Generalized cold-atom simulators for vacuum decay

Alexander C. Jenkins, Ian G. Moss, T. P. Billam, Zoran Hadzibabic, Hiranya V. Peiris, Andrew Pontzen

Published Sep 24, 2024• 0 citations

Abstract

© 2024 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/'Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Cold-atom analog experiments are a promising new tool for studying relativistic vacuum decay, enabling one to empirically probe early-Universe theories in the laboratory. However, existing proposals place stringent requirements on the atomic scattering lengths that are challenging to realize experimentally. Here we eliminate these restrictions and show that any stable mixture between two states of a bosonic isotope can be used as a faithful relativistic analog. This greatly expands the landscape of suitable experiments, and will expedite efforts to study vacuum decay with cold atoms.

DOI: 10.25405/ncl.34507353

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