Experimental Modeling of Cosmological Inflation with Metamaterials

Abstract

Recently we demonstrated that mapping of monochromatic extraordinary light distribution in a hyperbolic metamaterial along some spatial direction may model the flow of time and create an experimental toy model of the big bang. Here we extend this model to emulate cosmological inflation. This idea is illustrated in experiments performed with two-dimensional plasmonic hyperbolic metamaterials. Spatial dispersion which is always present in hyperbolic metamaterials results in scale-dependent (fractal) structure of the inflationary "metamaterial spacetime". This feature of our model replicates hypothesized fractal structure of the real observable universe.

17 pages, 3 figures. This version is accepted for publication in Physics Letters A

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• Holographic duality in nonlinear hyperbolic metamaterials
• Two-dimensional wave propagation without anomalous dispersion
• Optical properties of Born-Infeld-dilaton-Lifshitz holographic superconductors
• Fine tuning and MOND in a metamaterial multiverse
• Quantum Mechanics of Hyperbolic Metamaterials: Modeling of Quantum Time and Everett's Universal Wavefunction
• Metamaterial model of tachyonic dark energy
• Diamonds in Klein geometry
• Mechanical cosmology: simulating scalar fluctuations in expanding Universes using synthetic mechanical lattices
• Optical analogues to the Kerr-Newman black hole
• Extra-dimensional metamaterials: simple models of inflation and metric signature transitions
• Thermodynamics of effective Minkowski spacetime in self-assembled hyperbolic metamaterials