Analog cosmological reheating in an ultracold Bose gas

Understand

Cosmological reheating describes the transition of the post-inflationary universe to a hot and thermal state.

• In order to shed light on the underlying dynamics of this process, we propose to quantum-simulate the reheating-like dynamics of a generic cosmological single-field model in an ultracold Bose gas.
• In our setup, the excitations on top of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate play the role of the particles produced by the decaying inflaton field after inflation.
• Expanding spacetime as well as the background oscillating inflaton field are mimicked in the non-relativistic limit by a time dependence of the atomic interactions, which can be tuned experimentally via Feshbach resonances.