Conference

Active materials such as bacteria, molecular motors and eukaryotic cells continuously transform chemical energy taken from their surroundings to mechanical work. Dense active nematics show mesoscale turbulence, the emergence of chaotic flow structures characterised by high vorticity and self-propelled topological defects. I shall describe the physics of active nematics and discuss examples where this is relevant to living matter.

.Scalar quantum field theories can possess metastable vacuum states which decay through thermal and quantum fluctuations. In space, the decay of the metastable vacuum proceeds through the creation and subsequent expansion of bubbles containing a new phase, which coalesce and eventually complete the phase transition. Vacuum decay is a non-perturbative and non-linear dynamical problem, making it the perfect candidate for quantum simulators. Understanding this process has phenomenological implications for early Universe cosmology, including observables such as a stochastic gravitational wave background, meaning there may be novel ways to use quantum simulators to make predictions for observational cosmology. In this talk I will first describe theoretical work developing observables for vacuum decay, including nucleation site correlation functions and bubble nucleation pre-cursors. I will then describe experimental efforts within the Quantum Simulators for Fundamental Physics consortium to develop analog quantum simulators of vacuum decay with cold atomic gasses. Such experiments will allow us to empirically test early Universe physics in tabletop experiments.