arXiv:2504.03528·v2·Quantum Gases
Observation of Temperature Effects on False Vacuum Decay in Atomic Quantum Gases
Riccardo Cominotti (1)🇮🇹 · Cosetta Baroni (1,2)🇮🇹 · Chiara Rogora (1)🇮🇹 · Diego Andreoni (1)🇮🇹 · Giacomo Guarda (1)🇮🇹 · Giacomo Lamporesi (1)🇮🇹 · Gabriele Ferrari (1)🇮🇹 · Alessandro Zenesini (1) ((1) Pitaevskii BEC Center, CNR-INO and Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita' di Trento, Trento, Italy, and Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications, INFN, Trento, Italy (2) Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) and Institute for Experimental Physics, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria)🇮🇹
Abstract
Temperature plays a crucial role in metastable phenomena, not only by contributing to determine the state (phase) of a system, but also ruling the decay probability to more stable states. Such a situation is encountered in many different physical systems, ranging from chemical reactions to magnetic structures. The characteristic decay timescale is not always straightforward to estimate since it depends on the microscopic details of the system. A paradigmatic example in quantum field theories is the decay of the false vacuum, manifested via the nucleation of bubbles. In this paper, we measure the temperature dependence of the timescale for the false vacuum decay mechanism in an ultracold atomic quantum spin mixture which exhibits ferromagnetic properties. Our results show that the false vacuum decay rate scales with temperature as predicted by the finite-temperature extension of the instanton theory, and confirm atomic systems as an ideal platform where to study out-of-equilibrium field theories.
Comments: 10 pages, 8 figures