Simulating seeded vacuum decay in a cold atom system
  We propose to test the concept of seeded vacuum decay in cosmology using an
analogue gravity Bose-Einstein condensate system. The role of the nucleation
seed is played by a vortex within the condensate. We present two complementary
theoretical analyses that demonstrate seeded decay is the dominant decay
mechanism of the false vacuum. First, we adapt the standard instanton methods
to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Second, we use the truncated Wigner method to
study vacuum decay.
