Black holes, the most exotic bodies in the Universe, an absolutely abstract concept in our daily basis, might be objects of study in our laboratories.
Jeff Steinhauer, from Israel Institute of Technology, has simulated in his lab the Hawking radiation that takes place in black holes. This allows to study and better understand the quantum nature around a black hole, which might help in the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity. His work is published in Nature Physics.
Black holes wars
Black holes are exotic cosmic objects that arise after the cataclysmic death of vey massive stars. The extreme gravitational field in them doesn't allow neither light to scape from them. This makes it difficult to observe and study them. But General Relativity is a very powerful tool that allows theoreticians to explore them.
Stephen Hawking, in 1974, studying some quantum properties around black holes, predicted that they are not indeed really black, but gray. Black holes should emit radiation due to quantum fluctuations that can make appear and disappear virtual elementary particles around the black hole (very near to its event horizon). It happens that these virtual particles come in pairs of particle and antiparticle that appear and annihilate in a very small fraction of time. But it can happen that one of them falls into the hole while the other can scape. Hawking also predicted that this radiation should be random, thermal radiation, although recently this is not that clear, and trying to explain it has become the information paradox, an open, hot and passionate debate between theoreticians (Hawking, Maldacena, Suskind).
Quantum mechanics applies to very small scales, to elementary particles, while general gravity applies to high gravitational fields, stars, black holes, galaxies, the Universe. The fact that we don't find accesible in Nature situations where we have elementary particles and high gravitational fields at the same time, makes it almost impossible to have observational data to test and build the theory. That is why in the last decade some efforts have been driven to find alternative ways to explore black holes in the lab.
Simulating General Relativity in the Lab.
There are some works in the field of photonics that simulate the behavior of light around a black hole. Also, using a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a ultra-cold gas of atoms (one billionth of a degree above absolute zero) that can show macroscopic quantum behavior, Jeff Steinhauer, is doing experiments to create a sound-wave analog to a black hole. In his work, Steinhauer creates phonons, instead of photons, which are mechanical excitations and can be considered the equivalent of what photons are to light waves, but in sound waves. He stimulates the BEC with lasers to make them move at about 1 millimeter per second. This velocity is twice the speed of sound in the BEC. By doing this, he can trap phonons in the BEC just as photons are trapped in black holes. As the phonons are created spontaneously, just as virtual photons around the black hole, some of them can be trapped while their pair can scape, just mimicking Hawking radiation.
Steinhauer has found that phonons falling inside the acoustic black hole where entangled to phonons escaping, indicating that they were cerated from the same perturbation, just as pair of virtual particles. Also, Steinhauer found that the sound radiation observed was compatible with a noise radiation, as would be the case of thermal radiation from a black hole.
There are still some open questions to this work, such as the frequency analysis. The entanglement was clear for high energy phonons (high frequency), but was not that clear for low energy ones. Also, even though it could be though that these experiments could clarify the information paradox (unravel the characteristics of Hawking radiation to see if it can be extracted information from inside the black hole by using this radiation), it is not completely clear from this work.
In any case, a very interesting door has been open that can seed light into the darkness of black holes.
Physicist, working in quantum optics and nonlinear dynamics in optical systems. Loves to communicate science.