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.'"

Re:Am I slow?

[Ryvar]

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.

Re:Am I slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hawking radiation is the idea that everywhere around us, particle-antiparticle pairs are created and annihilated over and over, and we never notice because the result of the activity is zero, unless it just so happens that the particles somehow can't be combined back together again, say, one of them materializes inside the event horizon of a black hole while the other one doesn't.

I presume they're trying to see if such a pair can be created in this situation where one particle is stuck behind the wave while the other one isn't.

rindler horizon

[Fëanáro]

This reminds me of a rindler horizon [netspace.net.au]

A phenomen that has some similarities with a black hole, but without gravitational effects involved.

Re:I don't get sending a "slow" and then "fast" wa

[Gat0r30y]

Many optical fibers such as the one they are using have nonlinearities. Light of one frequency does not travel at the same speed as light of another frequency. They are exploiting this nonlinearity.

Re:It would blow

[Spy der Mann]

It would blow Hawking Radiation

Wow. That just blew my mind.

Re:Old SF

[RetiredMidn]

Does anybody remembers an old SF story in which a black hole is created and contained, and then somehow it _falls_ and start eating the Earth away? Cannot remember name or a author, but it gave me the creeps back then :o)

I remember reading a short story, probably in the 60's, with a plot like this. The story starts with investigators trying to understand a rash of mysterious structural failures around the world, and tracing them to tiny vertical holes drilled through whatever failed; including buildings. It's ultimately traced to a scientist who had been attempting to create a black hole in a mountaintop laboratory. The black hole couldn't be contained or supported (because it sucked in the material), and was basically in an "orbit" that carried it down to the center of the earth, back out the other side until it reached the same distance on the other side, and so on, like a pendulum. The rotation of the earth cause it to cross the surface at various places. The hole was becoming more destructive as it consumed more material and became larger, and the earth was doomed unless a way could be found to get rid of it. I think the story ended without resolution (before the earth is destroyed).

I got the creeps, too. I hope someone finds the title and author.

Re:Black Hole

[tm2b]

Nothing has really changed from the days of Copernicus and Kepler. They were persecuted and ridiculed for their then radical ideas, based on real observations, not fanciful math. Today, scientists who promulgate foundation rocking new concepts and promising new avenues of real research, are denied, by the scientific establishment, publication and funding. Science today is less and less interested in discovering truth, because there is always the danger that such truth will demolish cherished dogma.

"They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Columbus, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan