Welcome to Cosmology in the Laboratory
The aim of our experimental real-time studies is to exploit this analogy through studies of exemplary phase transitions in condensed matter physics in order to establish the validity of the analogy and explore the diverse behaviour of elementary fermionic and bosonic excitations through the transition.
Those who want to jump in at the deep end can go directly to the published paper: Yusupov et al., Nature Physics 6, 681 (2010), and the comment by Averitt, Nature Physics 6, 639 (2010)
Cosmology in the laboratory: why and how.
It is a fundamental principle of physics that there is a unified system of laws governing all scales from subatomic particles to the Cosmos. It is believed that the Universe, evolving from the initial hot Big Bang, would have undergone a series of symmetry-breaking phase transitions with observationally significant consequences such as the formation of topological defects. Direct experimental tests of these ideas are infeasible, but transitions described by very similar equations occur in experimentally accessible condensed-matter systems at low temperatures (From the ESF COSLAB project).
