In the expanding universe, relativistic scalar fields are thought to be attenuated by Hubble friction, which results from the dilation of the underlying spacetime metric. By contrast, in a contracting universe this pseudo-friction would lead to amplification. Here, we experimentally measure both Hubble attenuation and amplification in expanding and contracting toroidally-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates, in which phonons are analogous to cosmological scalar fields. We find that the observed attenuation or amplification depends on the temporal phase of the phonon field, which is only possible for non-adiabatic dynamics, in contrast to the expanding universe in its current epoch, which is adiabatic. The measured strength of the Hubble friction disagrees with recent theory [J. M. Gomez Llorente and J. Plata, Phys. Rev. A 100 043613 (2019) and S. Eckel and T. Jacobson, SciPost Phys. 10 64 (2021)], suggesting that our model does not yet capture all relevant physics. While our current work focuses on coherent-state phonons, it can be extended to regimes where quantum fluctuations in causally disconnected regions of space become important, leading to spontaneous pair-production.
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