Event Details

Friday Seminar - Speaker: Thomas Billam

Cold atomic gases offer the intriguing prospect of simulating the physics of the very early universe using laboratory analogues. In this talk I will give an introduction to cold-atom analogues of false vacuum decay, discussing the 'instanton' and stochastic theoretical approaches to the problem and what we hope to learn from analogues, and give an overview of the various laboratory schemes that have been proposed to create analogue quantum simulators. I will discuss two topics in some more detail: a proposed analogue of false vacuum decay in a quasi-relativistic effective Klein-Gordon field using a spin-1 Bose gas [1, 2], and the first realisation of a laboratory analogue of false vacuum decay in a ferromagnetic superfluid [3].

[1] False-vacuum decay in an ultracold spin-1 Bose gas, Thomas P. Billam, Kate Brown, and Ian G. Moss, Phys. Rev. A 105, L041301 (2022).

[2] Bubble nucleation in a cold spin 1 gas, Thomas P Billam, Kate Brown, and Ian G Moss, New J. Phys. 25, 043028 (2023).

[3] Observation of false vacuum decay via bubble formation in ferromagnetic superfluids, Alessandro Zenesini, Anna Berti, Riccardo Cominotti, Chiara Rogora, Ian G. Moss, Thomas P. Billam, Iacopo Carusotto, Giacomo Lamporesi, Alessio Recati, and Gabriele Ferrari, Nature Physics 20, 558-563 (2024)