Analog cosmological reheating in an ultracold Bose gas

Cosmological reheating describes the transition of the post-inflationary universe to a hot and thermal state. In order to shed light on the underlying dynamics of this process, we propose to quantum-simulate the reheating-like dynamics of a generic cosmological single-field model in an ultracold Bose gas. In our setup, the excitations on top of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate play the role of the particles produced by the decaying inflaton...