학술논문

Mechanical cosmology: simulating scalar fluctuations in expanding Universes using synthetic mechanical lattices
Document Type
Working Paper
Source
Subject
Condensed Matter - Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Language
Abstract
Inspired by recent advances in observational astrophysics and continued explorations in the field of analog gravity, we discuss the prospect of simulating models of cosmology within the context of synthetic mechanical lattice experiments. We focus on the physics of expanding Universe scenarios described by the Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) metric. Specifically, quantizing scalar fluctuations in a background FLRW spacetime leads to a quadratic bosonic Hamiltonian with temporally varying pair production terms. Here we present a mapping that provides a one-to-one correspondence between these classes of cosmology models and feedback-coupled mechanical oscillators. As proof-of-principle, we then perform experiments on a synthetic mechanical lattice composed of such oscillators. We simulate two different FLRW expansion scenarios with Universes dominated by vacuum energy and matter and discuss our experimental results.
Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures