Lab-Grown Black Hole May Have Just Proven That Hawking Radiation Exists
on
Physicist Jeff Steinhauer spent the last seven years perfecting a
method to replicate black holes in a quest to find whether Hawking
radiation exists. His laboratory simulation of a black hole showed
entangled particles breaking apart as one falls back into the black hole
and the other dissipates into "space," consistent with Hawking's
theory.
Lab-Grown Acoustic Black Hole
A few months ago, someone started working on building a black hole in a laboratory in a quest to find out whether Hawking radiation
could really exist. It took physicist Jeff Steinhauer, of the Israel
Institute of Technology, Haifa seven years to single-handedly perfect
his method to recreate black holes. And now the results have been published in Nature Physics.
Jeff Steinhauer single-handedly imitates black holes in a lab. Credit: Nitzan Zohar, Office of the Spokesperson, Technion.
His lab-grown black hole implies that Hawking was right.
In 1974, Hawking theorized that, contrary to the belief that a black
hole would continuously and infinitely suck in everything around it,
energy could in fact, seep out of it in the form of radiation. This
eventually became known as “Hawking radiation.” This causes a black
hole’s eventual demise, as the energy seeps out and the black hole
dissipates into nothing.
Recent findings did confirm that there are some things that could escape a black hole’s supposedly inescapable pull, such as light.
And this time, Steinhauer’s lab-grown black hole simulation showed
what is the closest evidence we could find (as of now) of Hawking
radiation, emanating from its event horizon.
4,600 Times to be Sure
Steinhauer cooled rubidium atoms to a few billionths of a degree
above absolute zero to cause them to enter a quantum state of matter,
behaving like clones of each other and clumping together to form a
“super particle” known as Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). This process
of recreating black holes was proposed in the 1980s but nobody bothered
to try building it until 2009.
Lasers are then used to force the atoms to move at supersonic speeds,
causing sound waves to get trapped inside the quantum fluids.
Steinhauer ran his experiment a staggering 4,600 times, and as Hawking predicted, pairs of phonons,
or packets of sound energy, appeared spontaneously at the even horizon.
One of them is then expelled away and the other falls back into the
black hole. This separation of the pairs is consistent with Hawking
radiation’s description of entangled particles annihilating each other
unless they exist in either side of a black hole’s event horizon.
Credit: IOPscience.
While this is quite a remarkable achievement in demonstrating the
feasibility of Hawking radiation, other physicists say that it’s not
enough to win Hawking a Nobel prize. Some doubt that what Steinhauer
generated were in fact, credible BECs, and that several replications
must be made in order for this to stand strong. Physicists also say that
only a direct observation from a real black hole could confirm his
theory—something that would most probably not happen within Hawking’s
lifetime, or possibly any of our’s.
Source: http://futurism.com/lab-grown-black-hole-may-have-just-proven-that-hawking-radiation-exists/
