Gibbons-Hawking Effect in the Sonic de Sitter Space-Time of an Expanding Bose-Einstein-Condensed Gas

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental setup using an expanding Bose-Einstein condensate to observe the Gibbons-Hawking effect, demonstrating a thermal phonon distribution analogous to a de Sitter universe.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to simulate and detect the Gibbons-Hawking effect in a sonic de Sitter space within a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Findings

Atomic quantum dot observes a thermal Bose distribution.

The setup simulates a 1+1D de Sitter universe.

Thermal distribution matches the predicted de Sitter temperature.

Abstract

We propose an experimental scheme to observe the Gibbons-Hawking effect in the acoustic analog of a 1+1-dimensional de Sitter universe, produced in an expanding, cigar-shaped Bose-Einstein condensate. It is shown that a two-level system created at the center of the trap, an atomic quantum dot interacting with phonons, observes a thermal Bose distribution at the de Sitter temperature.