Cosmological Particle Creation in the Lab?

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-00266-8_3zbMATH Open1328.83016arXiv1203.1173OpenAlexW3121374810MaRDI QIDQ5261907FDOQ5261907

Publication date: 8 July 2015

Published in: Lecture Notes in Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: One of the most striking examples for the production of particles out of the quantum vacuum due to external conditions is cosmological particle creation, which is caused by the expansion or contraction of the Universe. Already in 1939, Schr"odinger understood that the cosmic evolution could lead to a mixing of positive and negative frequencies and that this "would mean production or annihilation of matter, merely by the expansion". Later this phenomenon was derived via more modern techniques of quantum field theory in curved space-times by Parker (who apparently was not aware of Schr"odinger's work) and subsequently has been studied in numerous publications. Even though cosmological particle creation typically occurs on extremely large length scales, it is one of the very few examples for such fundamental effects where we actually may have observational evidence: According to the inflationary model of cosmology, the seeds for the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and basically all large scale structures stem from this effect. In this Chapter, we shall provide a brief discussion of this phenomenon and sketch a possibility for an experimental realization via an analogue in the laboratory.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.1173

zbMATH Keywords

expansion of the Universe cosmological particle creation quantum vacuum effects in curved space times

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Quantum field theory on curved space or space-time backgrounds (81T20) Methods of quantum field theory in general relativity and gravitational theory (83C47) Relativistic cosmology (83F05) Astrophysical cosmology (85A40) Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to relativity and gravitational theory (83-02)

Cited In (1)

Entanglement of arbitrary spin modes in expanding universe

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