We propose to simulate a Dirac field near an event horizon using ultracold atoms in an optical lattice. Such a quantum simulator allows for the observation of the celebrated Unruh effect. Our proposal involves three stages: (1) preparation of the ground state of a massless 2D Dirac field in Minkowski spacetime; (2) quench of the optical lattice setup to simulate how an accelerated observer would view that state; (3) measurement of the local quantum fluctuation spectra by one-particle excitation spectroscopy in order to simulate a De Witt detector. According to Unruh's prediction, fluctuations measured in such a way must be thermal. Moreover, following Takagi's inversion theorem, they will obey the Bose-Einstein distribution, which will smoothly transform into the Fermi-Dirac as one of the dimensions of the lattice is reduced.
@article{arxiv.1606.09505,
title = {Synthetic Unruh effect in cold atoms},
author = {Javier Rodriguez-Laguna and Leticia Tarruell and Maciej Lewenstein and Alessio Celi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.09505},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
v4 17 pages, 12 figures, minor changes, similar to the published version