Simulating cosmological supercooling with a cold atom system

Abstract

We perform an analysis of the supercooled state in an analogue to an early universe phase transition based on a one dimensional, two-component Bose gas. We demonstrate that the thermal fluctuations in the relative phase between the components are characteristic of a relativistic thermal system. Furthermore, we demonstrate the equivalence of two different approaches to the decay of the metastable state: specifically a non-perturbative thermal instanton calculation and a stochastic Gross--Pitaevskii simulation.