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Laser Light Re-creates 'Black Holes' in the Lab
yodasz writes "The New Scientist reports that a team of researchers from the UK were able to recreate a black hole's event horizon in the lab by firing a laser pulse down an optical fibre. The team's observations confirm predictions made by cosmologists and now they are trying to prove Hawking's hypothesis of escaping particles, dubbed Hawking radiation. 'The first pulse distorts the optical properties of the fibre simply by traveling through it. This distortion forces the speedy probe wave to slow down dramatically when it catches up with the slower pulse and tries to move through it. In fact, the probe wave becomes trapped and can never overtake the pulse's leading edge, which effectively becomes a black hole event horizon, beyond which light cannot escape.'"
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Please, New Scientist is not a credible source for news on physical science. I wish people would stop posting New Scientist articles. If you want to find out what's hot in physics the Physical Review Focus is a great accessible source of real science stories that are important, and unlike the PRL they are free to read. http://focus.aps.org/
ugh, dude, did you RTFA? this experiment had nothing to do with black holes, singularities, Hawking radiation, or any kind of mass. It was a trick of optics to produce an ANALOGUE of an event horizon
it is currently IMPOSSIBLE to produce any kind of singularity. The LHC has a chance, infinitesimal, to do so, but that's still quite a ways off.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
I am also perplexed. I to am not an expert on relativity & cosmology, but I know a thing or two about nonlinear optics. An intense light field can modify the index of refraction of the medium through which it's propagating. This is known as the AC or optical Kerr effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_effect/ The second light pulse will gradually encounter a higher index as it approaches the first pulse and therefore slow down. While I know nothing about Hawking radiation, it seems like gravity must be somehow involved, and this experiment is all about electromagnetic forces.
The bit that's missing from this article, and that completes the explanation of why this is interesting, is the question of information.
One of the open questions facing physics is whether the event horizon of a black hole destroys information. It's not just the event horizon itself that is interesting, the destruction of information is by itself a legitimately interesting question by itself.
If we can create an optical event horizon that also seems to destroy information, this may allow us to witness how the Universe responds to such information destruction. This is radically easier than creating a large enough black hole to observe these effects. Black hole horizons are interesting in many ways; this may allow us to extract and experiment on one aspect of them.
I've seen a few proposals for the creation of an optical black hole, this is the first claim I've seen that someone may have actually created one.