  We propose a new experimental testbed that uses ions in the collective ground
state of a static trap for studying the analog of quantum-field effects in
cosmological spacetimes, including the Gibbons-Hawking effect for a single
detector in de Sitter spacetime, as well as the possibility of modeling
inflationary structure formation and the entanglement signature of de Sitter
spacetime. To date, proposals for using trapped ions in analog gravity
experiments have simulated the effect of gravity on the field modes by directly
manipulating the ions' motion. In contrast, by associating laboratory time with
conformal time in the simulated universe, we can encode the full effect of
curvature in the modulation of the laser used to couple the ions' vibrational
motion and electronic states. This model simplifies the experimental
requirements for modeling the analog of an expanding universe using trapped
ions and enlarges the validity of the ion-trap analogy to a wide range of
interesting cases.
