Simulating cosmological supercooling with a cold atom system

TL;DR

This paper models early universe phase transitions using a one-dimensional two-component Bose gas, showing thermal fluctuations resemble relativistic systems and comparing two decay approaches for metastable states.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analogue system for cosmological supercooling and compares non-perturbative and stochastic simulation methods for decay processes.

Findings

Thermal fluctuations mimic relativistic thermal systems.

Equivalence of instanton and stochastic decay approaches.

Demonstration of supercooling dynamics in Bose gases.

Abstract

We perform an analysis of the supercooled state in an analogue to an early universe phase transition based on a one dimensional, two-component Bose gas. We demonstrate that the thermal fluctuations in the relative phase between the components are characteristic of a relativistic thermal system. Furthermore, we demonstrate the equivalence of two different approaches to the decay of the metastable state: specifically a non-perturbative thermal instanton calculation and a stochastic Gross--Pitaevskii simulation.