[RBRC seminar] Towards quantum simulations of cosmological particle production

by Dr David Frenklakh (BNL)

Thursday 4 Dec 2025, 12:30 → 14:30 America/New_York

2-160 (https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1600983728?pwd=RAD7OLcqre7Ycsp6JfFp6HAnpyLxex.1)

Understanding real-time, nonperturbative dynamics in strongly interacting matter, such as the quark–gluon plasma, is notoriously difficult for Euclidean lattice methods because of the sign problem. Recently, however, quantum-simulation platforms and classical Hamiltonian techniques have made remarkable progress, offering a natural approach to real-time physics. In this talk, I will report on our studies of quantum dynamics in an expanding background, implemented through a time-dependent metric. Starting from the vacuum, we observe particle production, correlation growth, and the emergence of entanglement—phenomena that are challenging to capture in an interacting QFT using traditional approaches. Besides their direct connection to cosmology, these results provide a foundation for future simulations with more realistic initial conditions relevant to heavy-ion physics.