Fermion production at the boundary of an expanding universe: a cold-atom gravitational analogue

Abstract

We study the phenomenon of cosmological particle production of Dirac fermions in a Friedman-Robertson-Walker spacetime, focusing on a (1+1)-dimensional case in which the evolution of the scale factor is set by the equations of Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity. As a first step towards a quantum simulation of this phenomenon, we consider two possible lattice regularizations, which allow us to explore the interplay of particle production and topological phenomena in spacetimes with a boundary. In particular, for a Wilson-type discretization of the Dirac field, the asymptotic Minkowski vacua connected by the intermediate expansion corresponds to symmetry-protected topological groundstates, and have a boundary manifestation in the form of zero-modes exponentially localized to the spatial boundaries. We show that particle production can also populate these zero modes, which contrasts with the situation with a naïve-fermion discretization, in which conformal zero-mass fields exhibit no particle production. We present a scheme for the quantum simulation of this gravitational analogue by means of ultra-cold atoms in Raman optical lattices, which requires real-time control of the Raman-beam detuning according to the scale factor of the simulated spacetime, as well as band-mapping measurements.

31 pages, 11 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Prediction of the Expansion of the Universe made by Alexander Friedmann and the Effect of Particle Creation in Cosmology
• Interacting Dirac fields in an expanding universe: dynamical condensates and particle production
• Chiral spin liquid phase in an optical lattice at mean-field level
• Time Crystal from Self-Amplification of Spontaneous Analog Hawking Radiation
• Digit quantum simulation of a fermion field in an expanding universe