Colloquia

In recent years there has been much interest in the field of "analogue gravity", in which cosmological or astrophysical phenomena like Hawking radiation are mimicked in a laboratory experiment.  At LSU, my research group in cold atom/condensed matter theory became interested in this field, motivated by the recent experiment of Eckel and collaborators, [Phys. Rev. X 8, 021021 (2018)] who used a rapidly expanding Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to reproduce the inflationary regime of the early universe.  I will present our work on the physics of inflation in expanding BEC's, and discuss other setups to detect analogue gravity phenomena like the Unruh effect.