Although particle production in curved quantum field theories (cQFTs) is key to our understanding of the early Universe and black hole physics, its direct observation requires extreme conditions or unrealistic sensitivities. Recent progress in quantum simulators indicates that analogs of cosmological particle production can be observed in tabletop experiments of cold atomic gases described by effective cQFTs. This promises a high degree of tunability in the synthesized curved spacetimes and, moreover, sets a clear roadmap to explore the interplay of particle production with other nonperturbative effects genuine to interacting QFTs. We hereby focus on the appearance of scalar and pseudoscalar condensates for self-interacting Dirac fermions and study how dynamical mass generation and spontaneous symmetry breaking affects real-time dynamics through the lens of entanglement. We use the entanglement contour (EC) to analyze the spatiotemporal structure of particle production, showing that a quasiparticle picture for the EC captures the cosmological horizon in accelerating spacetimes while also being sensitive to the effect of different symmetry-breaking processes. In particular, we show that the combined breakdown of time-reversal symmetry due to the expanding spacetime, and parity due to a pseudoscalar condensate, manifests through the structure of the light-cone-like propagation of entanglement.

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• Dirac fermions
• Particle production
• Quantum entanglement
• Spontaneous symmetry breaking
• Lattice field theory
• Variational approach