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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.'"
As long as they didn't create a real black hole.
That would suck.
No Nyarlathotep, No Chaos
Know Nyarlathotep, Know Chaos
That sounds safe, to reproduce the effects of the point at which all matter collapses into a virtual singularity. Where were they testing this again? Somewhere on Earth? Alrighty then... Taxi!
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I was under the impression it was due to quantum particle pairs forming spontaneously. Under "normal" conditions we don't see these things because the pairs collide and sort of evaporate back to wherever the hell those things come from. However, in a black hole one of the particles escapes leaving the energy balance, well, in balance. The only reason that radiation escapes is that its partner went into the black hole absorbing some of its energy. Apparently, this phenomenon will cause all black holes to shrink to nothing over a long enough period of time.
I read about it in "The Physics of Star Trek", but Wikipedia has something on it too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
Not to be picky, but you do know there's a little bit more to the event horizon of a black hole than the fact that light can't get out of it? Let's not confuse interesting optical effects with singularities. They are...different.
could someone give me a little prep on this article.. A paragraph or two on how the universe works would be good. cheers. /obligatory
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
IANAP, but as I understand it, Hawking radiation is caused by virtual particles pairs being created such that rather than annihilating each other and returning local space to a base 'zero' state, one of the pair escapes the singularity's gravity and the other does not.
One fortunate consequence of this is that smaller black holes 'evaporate' more quickly, and the microscopic black holes we'll likely be generating at the Large Hadron Collider will cease to exist before they've even had sufficient time to absorb a neutrino.
Warning: do not look into laser with remaining good eye.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
It would blow Hawking Radiation
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/
"I call it a Hawking Hole".
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
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.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Earth http://www.amazon.com/Earth-David-Brin/dp/055329024X
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
This reminds me of a rindler horizon
A phenomen that has some similarities with a black hole, but without gravitational effects involved.
God made the universe 6,000 years ago. If you do not worship him and subjugate yourself to his will, he will torture you forever. He just put in things like dinosaur bones and black holes to mess with your head, to get you to disbelieve in him, so that he can torture you forever without feeling guilty about it.
He's kinda messed up because he was alone for like, eternity, until he made up some friends in his head, but he's incapable of imagining anything that is actually his peer, so he secretly hates us all for not providing the companionship he needs. That is how the universe works.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.