Analogue simulation of gravitational waves in a 3+1 dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how to manipulate a Bose-Einstein condensate to simulate the effects of gravitational waves, enabling laboratory studies of quantum-GW interactions and testing GW detection schemes.

Contribution

It introduces a method to mimic gravitational wave metrics in a 3+1D BEC by controlling external potentials and magnetic fields, advancing quantum simulation of GWs.

Findings

Successfully reproduces GW metrics in a BEC environment

Provides explicit expressions for simulating various GW sources

Enables testing of quantum interactions with GWs in laboratory settings

Abstract

The recent detections of gravitational waves (GWs) by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations have opened the field of GW astronomy, intensifying interest in GWs and other possible detectors sensitive in different frequency ranges. Although strong GW producing events are rare and currently unpredictable, GWs can in principle be simulated in analogue systems at will in the lab. Simulation of GWs in a manifestly quantum system would allow for the study of the interaction of quantum phenomena with GWs. Such predicted interaction is exploited in a recently proposed Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) based GW detector. In this paper, we show how to manipulate a BEC to mimic the effect of a passing GW. By simultaneously varying the external potential applied to the BEC, and an external magnetic field near a Feshbach resonance, we show that the resulting change in speed of sound can directly reproduce a GW metric. We also show how to simulate a metric used in the recently proposed BEC based GW detector, to provide an environment for testing the proposed metrology scheme of the detector. Explicit expressions for simulations of various GW sources are given. This result is also useful to generally test the interaction of quantum phenomena with GWs in a curved spacetime analogue experiment.