Simulating cosmological supercooling with a cold atom system. II. Thermal damping and parametric instability

We perform an analysis of the supercooled state in an analog of an early universe phase transition based on a one-dimensional, two-component Bose gas with time-dependent interactions. We demonstrate that the system behaves in the same way as a thermal, relativistic Bose gas undergoing a first-order phase transition. We propose a way to prepare the state of the system in the metastable phase as an analog to supercooling in the early universe. We show that parametric resonances in the system can be suppressed by thermal damping if the damping rate is similar to some of the higher rates previously used for modeling nonequilibrium experiments. However, the theoretically predicted damping rate for equilibrium systems within our model is too weak to suppress the resonances.

Automated summary

The study analyzes the supercooled state in an analog of an early universe phase transition using a one-dimensional, two-component Bose gas with time-dependent interactions. It shows that the system behaves similarly to a thermal, relativistic Bose gas undergoing a first-order phase transition. The study proposes a method to prepare the system in a metastable phase and reveals that parametric resonances can be suppressed by thermal damping.