Simulating seeded vacuum decay in a cold atom system

Understand

We propose to test the concept of seeded vacuum decay in cosmology using an analogue gravity Bose-Einstein condensate system.

• The role of the nucleation seed is played by a vortex within the condensate.
• We present two complementary theoretical analyses that demonstrate seeded decay is the dominant decay mechanism of the false vacuum.
• First, we adapt the standard instanton methods to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.