Analogue cosmological particle creation in an ultracold quantum fluid of light

The rapid expansion of the early universe resulted in the spontaneous production of cosmological particles from vacuum fluctuations, some of which are observable today in the cosmic microwave background anisotropy. The analogue of cosmological particle creation in a quantum fluid was proposed, but t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2022-05, Vol.13 (1), p.2890-2890, Article 2890
Main Authors: Steinhauer, Jeff, Abuzarli, Murad, Aladjidi, Tangui, Bienaimé, Tom, Piekarski, Clara, Liu, Wei, Giacobino, Elisabeth, Bramati, Alberto, Glorieux, Quentin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/33/34/124
639/624/400/3925
Anisotropy
Bose-Einstein condensates
Cosmic microwave background
Fluctuations
General Physics
Helium
Humanities and Social Sciences
multidisciplinary
Physics
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Vacuum
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Summary:The rapid expansion of the early universe resulted in the spontaneous production of cosmological particles from vacuum fluctuations, some of which are observable today in the cosmic microwave background anisotropy. The analogue of cosmological particle creation in a quantum fluid was proposed, but the quantum, spontaneous effect due to vacuum fluctuations has not yet been observed. Here we report the spontaneous creation of analogue cosmological particles in the laboratory, using a quenched 3-dimensional quantum fluid of light. We observe acoustic peaks in the density power spectrum, in close quantitative agreement with the quantum-field theoretical prediction. We find that the long-wavelength particles provide a window to early times. This work introduces the quantum fluid of light, as cold as an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. Under certain conditions light can act as a fluid like a Bose-Einstein condensate. Here the authors discuss an analogy of cosmological particle creation using such a quantum fluid of light.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-022-30603-1