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Accurate Determination of Hubble Attenuation and Amplification in Expanding and Contracting Cold-Atom Universes

Published

Author(s)

Swarnav Banik, Monica Gutierrez Galan, Hector Sosa Martinez, 1, Madison Anderson, Stephen Eckel, Ian Spielman, Gretchen K. Campbell

Abstract

In the expanding universe, relativistic scalar fields are thought to be attenuated by "Hubble friction," which results from the dilation of the underlying spacetime metric. By contrast, in a contracting universe this pseudofriction would lead to amplification. Here, we experimentally measure, with fivefold better accuracy, both Hubble attenuation and amplification in expanding and contracting toroidally shaped Bose-Einstein condensates, in which phonons are analogous to cosmological scalar fields. We find that the observed attenuation or amplification depends on the temporal phase of the phonon field, which is only possible for nonadiabatic dynamics. The measured strength of the Hubble friction disagrees with recent theory [Gomez Llorente et al., Phys. Rev. A 100, 043613 (2019) and Eckel et al., SciPost Phys. 10, 64 (2021)].
Citation
Physical Review Letters
Volume
128

Citation

Banik, S. , Gutierrez Galan, M. , Sosa Martinez, H. , 1, M. , Anderson, S. , Eckel, I. and Spielman, G. (2022), Accurate Determination of Hubble Attenuation and Amplification in Expanding and Contracting Cold-Atom Universes, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.090401, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=932651 (Accessed December 14, 2024)

Issues

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Created February 28, 2022, Updated November 29, 2022