An Expanding Universe in the Lab

Cold atoms can be used to emulate physical systems that are hard to study experimentally, like supersolids, superconductors, or black holes. Now, Gretchen Campbell at the University of Maryland, College Park, and co-workers have shown that the rapid expansion of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) exhibits several features reminiscent of those that characterize an expanding universe. They suggest that their BEC system could be used as a laboratory test bed for cosmological theories.