The Unruh Fest: A Celebration in Honour of Bill Unruh's 70th Birthday

Can high energy physics can be simulated by low-energy, nonrelativistic, many-body systems, such as ultracold atoms? Ultracold atomic systems lack the type of symmetries and dynamical properties of high energy physics models: in particular, they do not manifest local gauge invariance nor Lorentz invariance, which are crucial properties of the quantum field theories which are the building blocks of the standard model of elementary particles. However, it will be shown that there are ways to configure atomic system to manifest both local gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance. In particular, local gauge invariance can arise either as an effective, low energy, symmetry, or as an "exact" symmetry, following from the conservation laws in atomic interactions. Such quantum simulators may lead to new type of (table-top) experiments, to test various QCD phenomena, as the confinement of dynamical quarks, phase transitions, and other effects.

Due to the linearity of the field equations and the resulting bilinear structure of the Hamiltonian, quantum radiation effects such as black hole evaporation or particle creation in an expanding universe are typically described as (squeezing) processes where particles are created in pairs. Here, we address the following question: given a mode (e.g., wave-packet) corresponding to a created particle (e.g., as part of Hawking radiation), what is its partner, i.e., the other particle of the pair? After a general derivation of this partner mode, we will discuss some examples such as moving mirror radiation and speculate about possible implications for the black hole information puzzle.