Nonlinear dynamics of the cold atom analog false vacuum

Abstract

We investigate the nonlinear dynamics of cold atom systems that can in princi- ple serve as quantum simulators of false vacuum decay. The analog false vacuum manifests as a metastable vacuum state for the relative phase in a two-species Bose-Einstein con- densate (BEC), induced by a driven periodic coupling between the two species. In the appropriate low energy limit, the evolution of the relative phase is approximately governed by a relativistic wave equation exhibiting true and false vacuum configurations. In previous work, a linear stability analysis identified exponentially growing short-wavelength modes driven by the time-dependent coupling. These modes threaten to destabilize the analog false vacuum. Here, we employ numerical simulations of the coupled Gross-Pitaevski equa- tions (GPEs) to determine the non-linear evolution of these linearly unstable modes. We find that unless a physical mechanism modifies the GPE on short length scales, the analog false vacuum is indeed destabilized. We briefly discuss various physically expected correc- tions to the GPEs that may act to remove the exponentially unstable modes. To investigate the resulting dynamics in cases where such a removal mechanism exists, we implement a hard UV cutoff that excludes the unstable modes as a simple model for these corrections. We use this to study the range of phenomena arising from such a system. In particular, we show that by modulating the strength of the time-dependent coupling, it is possible to observe the crossover between a second and first order phase transition out of the false vacuum.