2016/06/30 by Javier Rodriguez-Laguna, Leticia Tarruell, Maciej Lewenstein +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas #gr-qc #hep-th #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.95.013627
published as Phys. Rev. A 95, 013627 (2017) · v4 17 pages, 12 figures, minor changes, similar to the published version
arxiv created 2017/01/24 · arxiv updated 2017/02/01
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.