Analog Cosmology in a Quenched Bose-Einstein Condensate Bubble
Abstract
Recent interest and realization of ultracold bosons confined in shell-shaped, or bubble, traps have opened up several directions in the study of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in intrinsically curved geometries. Here, we explore the prospect of using thin spherical shell-shaped BECs as analog gravity simulators of an expanding or contracting curved universe. We study an interacting BEC bubble subject to a temporal quench of the interaction strength. Our theoretical approach, which uses a Bogoliubov treatment following a dimensional reduction of a spherical BEC to the low-energy excitations of a shell-shaped structure, demonstrates how this system serves as a laboratory analog for a positively curved universe having a time-varying scale factor. We investigate spontaneous pair production triggered by quenches associated with exponentially decaying or growing interaction strengths, focusing on the emergence of oscillations in the structure factor---analogous to Sakharov oscillations in the Cosmic Microwave Background angular power spectrum. We quantify the entanglement of the produced pairs via logarithmic negativity, and show how this measure may be extracted from the power spectrum. These findings establish a bridge between quantum information science and early-universe cosmology in a laboratory setting.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhai2026analog,
title = {{Analog Cosmology in a Quenched Bose-Einstein Condensate Bubble}},
author = {Ruotong Zhai and Brendan Rhyno and Zain Mehdi and Naceur Gaaloul and Smitha Vishveshwara and Daniel E. Sheehy},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.20382},
eprint = {2610.20382},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20382},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Analog Cosmology in a Quenched Bose-Einstein Condensate Bubble
AU - Ruotong Zhai
AU - Brendan Rhyno
AU - Zain Mehdi
AU - Naceur Gaaloul
AU - Smitha Vishveshwara
AU - Daniel E. Sheehy
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.20382
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20382
AB - Recent interest and realization of ultracold bosons confined in shell-shaped, or bubble, traps have opened up several directions in the study of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in intrinsically curved geometries. Here, we explore the prospect of using thin spherical shell-shaped BECs as analog gravity simulators of an expanding or contracting curved universe. We study an interacting BEC bubble subject to a temporal quench of the interaction strength. Our theoretical approach, which uses a Bogoliubov treatment following a dimensional reduction of a spherical BEC to the low-energy excitations of a shell-shaped structure, demonstrates how this system serves as a laboratory analog for a positively curved universe having a time-varying scale factor. We investigate spontaneous pair production triggered by quenches associated with exponentially decaying or growing interaction strengths, focusing on the emergence of oscillations in the structure factor---analogous to Sakharov oscillations in the Cosmic Microwave Background angular power spectrum. We quantify the entanglement of the produced pairs via logarithmic negativity, and show how this measure may be extracted from the power spectrum. These findings establish a bridge between quantum information science and early-universe cosmology in a laboratory setting.
ER -