Nonlinear Dynamics of the Cold Atom Analog False Vacuum

Understand

We investigate the nonlinear dynamics of cold atom systems that can in principle serve as quantum simulators of false vacuum decay.

• The analog false vacuum manifests as a metastable vacuum state for the relative phase in a two-species Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), induced by a driven periodic coupling between the two species.
• In the appropriate low energy limit, the evolution of the relative phase is approximately governed by a relativistic wave equation exhibiting true and false vacuum configurations.
• In previous work, a linear stability analysis identified exponentially growing short-wavelength modes driven by the time-dependent coupling.