“Simulations of many-body systems: Furry and Coleman revisited”

Wendell Furry [1] and Sydney Coleman [5] were two of Harvard's most original quantum theorists. What can modern technology contribute to their work? Experimentally tested simulations of optomechanics[4] and atom interferometers [3], with thermal noise and losses, will be used to analyse proposals for testing Furry's nonlocal decoherence, and Coleman's QFT tunnelling to the true vacuum. Both entanglement decoherence and massive Schrodinger cats are testable [4] through an optomechanical memory, simulated using the positive-P representation. Coleman's vacuum tunneling idea will be applied to construct a proposal for a laboratory model of the quantum fluctuations in the 'Big Bang', using a coupled BEC experiment simulated with a Wigner representation [6].

[1] W. H. Furry, Phys. Rev. 49, 393 (1936). [2] A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, Phys. Rev. 47, 777 (1935). [3] M. Egorov et. al, Phys. Rev.

A 84, 021605 (2011). [4] S. Kiesewetter, R. Y. Teh, P. Drummond and M. Reid, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 023601 (2017). [5] S. Coleman, Phys. Rev. D 15, 2929

(1977). [6] O. Fialko et. al., J. Phys. B 50 024003 (2017).