Massive phonon modes from a BEC-based analog model

Abstract

Two-component BECs subject to laser-induced coupling exhibit a complicated spectrum of excitations, which can be viewed as two interacting phonon modes. We study the conditions required to make these two phonon modes decouple. Once decoupled, the phonons not only can be arranged travel at different speeds, but one of the modes can be given a mass -- it exhibits the dispersion relation of a massive relativistic particle: omega = sqrt{omega_0^2 + c^2 k^2}. This is a new and unexpected excitation mode for the coupled BEC system. Apart from its intrinsic interest to the BEC community, this observation is also of interest for the ``analogue gravity'' programme, as it opens the possibility for using BECs to simulate massive relativistic particles in an effective ``acoustic geometry''.