Analogue gravity with Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract: Analogue gravity explores how collective excitations in condensed matter systems can reproduce the behavior of fields in curved spacetimes. An important example is the acoustic black holes that can occur for sound in a moving fluid. In these lecture notes, we focus on atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), quantum fluids that provide an interesting platform for analogue gravity studies thanks to their accurate theoretical description, remarkable experimental control, and ultralow temperatures that allow the quantum nature of sound to emerge. We give a pedagogical introduction to analogue black holes and the theoretical description of BECs and their elementary excitations, which behave as quantum fields in curved spacetimes. We then apply these tools to survey the current understanding of black-hole superradiance and analogue Hawking radiation, including explicit examples and numerical methods.