"Cosmological" quasiparticle production in harmonically trapped superfluid gases

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how superfluid gases in harmonic traps can simulate cosmological quasiparticle production, providing a platform for studying early universe phenomena through controlled laboratory experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a method to create effective cosmological space-times in superfluid gases and proposes an experimental detection technique for quasiparticle production.

Findings

Effective quasiparticle space-times can be realized in superfluid gases.

Trapping potentials induce cosmological particle production analogues.

Density-density correlations can detect quasiparticle creation.

Abstract

We show that a variety of cosmologically motivated effective quasiparticle space-times can be produced in harmonically trapped superfluid Bose and Fermi gases. We study the analogue of cosmological particle production in these effective space-times, induced by trapping potentials and coupling constants possessing an arbitrary time dependence. The WKB probabilities for phonon creation from the superfluid vacuum are calculated, and an experimental procedure to detect quasiparticle production by measuring density-density correlation functions is proposed.