Ultrafast Laser Pulse Makes Desktop Black Hole Glow

[jayfish]

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/09/ultrafast-laser-pulse-makes-desktop-black-hole-glow.ars?comments=1#comments-bar

A desktop black hole created in a lab in Italy has been shown to emit light, a discovery that could seal one of the biggest holes in theoretical physics and pave the way for physicist Stephen Hawking to win a Nobel prize.

The eerie glow is called Hawking radiation, and physicists have been hunting it for decades. In 1974, Stephen Hawking calculated that, rather than gobbling up everything in their path and giving nothing back, black holes can radiate like the heating element in a toaster.

But astrophysical black holes, the ultradense gobs of mass that lurk at the centers of galaxies and are left behind when stars collapse, radiate too dimly to be seen. So instead of looking at real black holes, a group of physicists led by Francesco Belgiorno of the University of Milan, Italy, created a miniature analog by shooting short pulses of intense laser light into a chip of glass. The results will appear in Physical Review Letters.

"This is an extremely important paper," said physicist Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, who built an artificial black hole in a phone line in 2008. "The experiment confirms that Hawking radiation can exist in principle."

I guess Hawking might need to un-concede the bet.

[laconicsax]

1. I thought Hawking was a discredited hack...I read it in this very forum.

:shrug:

[Nihil]

2. For the benefit of anyone else who didn't know ...

... how they could model a black hole on a desktop or in a phone line ...

>> In the 1980s, two physicists independently suggested this thought experiment:
>> Picture a black hole as a river that flows faster and faster as it approaches
>> a waterfall. Fleet-finned fish headed upstream can escape the falls, but at a
>> certain point the water flows faster than the fish can swim. Any hapless fish
>> caught behind that point are doomed to flop backwards over the falls.
>> Replacing fish with light and the river with gravity yields a good simulation
>> of a black hole.
>>
>> Replace the fish with any other wave and the river with any fluid moving faster
>> than that wave, and the likeness goes deeper. Physicists have found that the
>> math describing light moving in the warped space-time geometry around a black
>> hole is exactly the same as the math describing waves flowing through moving
>> fluids. The analogy works for white holes, theoretical objects where nothing
>> can get in rather than out, as well. And mathematically, Hawking radiation
>> doesn’t need gravity or curved space-time at all. It just needs an event
>> horizon.
>>
>> In the new study, Belgiorno and colleagues created an event horizon with two
>> quick pulses of laser light inside a piece of glass.

The full explanation - how the pulsed laser does it - is obviously in the
OP linked article but I just found it a fascinating concept that solved
my little WTF moment when I read "who built an artificial black hole in
a phone line in 2008" ...

:hi: