Description
Amongst Matt Visser’s many and varied contributions to physics, a clear stand-out is his pioneering efforts in analog gravity. This once esoteric subject has now grown into a full-fledged sub discipline that involves a healthy and exciting interplay between theory and experiment. In recent years it has become appreciated that the vacuum state — the analog vacuum — can be used to test ideas in Relativistic Quantum Information, or RQI. The quantum vacuum is simulated by phononic surface fluctuations of a pancake-shaped Bose-Einstein condensate (the analog vacuum), coupled to a laser that can serve as a 2-level Unruh-DeWitt detector. After outlining the basics of RQI, I will describe RQI phenomena that could be tested using the analog gravity approach. These include the harvesting of entanglement from the analog vacuum and detector superposition. In this latter case, the response function corresponding of a detector in a superposition of locations and states of motion appears in the difference-photocurrent power spectrum. Operating beyond the standard quantum limit using squeezed light, the signal-to-noise ratio is estimated as larger than 10 for extracting the response function over a broad set of baseband frequencies.