Steinhauer Jeff, Abuzarli Murad, Aladjidi Tangui, Bienaimé Tom, Piekarski Clara, Liu Wei, Giacobino Elisabeth, Bramati Alberto, Glorieux Quentin
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, ENS-PSL Research University, Collège de France, Paris, 75005, France.
Department of Physics, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Technion City, Haifa, 32000, Israel.
Nat Commun. 2022 May 25;13(1):2890. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-30603-1.
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.
早期宇宙的快速膨胀导致了由真空涨落自发产生宇宙学粒子，其中一些粒子如今可在宇宙微波背景各向异性中被观测到。人们提出了在量子流体中产生类似宇宙学粒子的设想，但由于真空涨落导致的量子自发效应尚未被观测到。在此，我们报告了在实验室中利用猝灭的三维光量子流体自发产生类似宇宙学粒子的情况。我们在密度功率谱中观测到声学峰值，与量子场论预测在数量上高度吻合。我们发现长波长粒子为早期宇宙提供了一个窗口。这项工作引入了与原子玻色 - 爱因斯坦凝聚体一样冷的光量子流体。
