30-Year Old Hawking Prediction Becomes a Reality
In 1974, Hawking stated a theory that virtual “particle-antiparticle” pairs can be created outside the event horizon of a black hole, with the event horizon consisting of a gravitational point-of-no-return, where space-time is bent so that light cannot escape it. It creates a region in space where nothing is allowed to leave, and where nothing can go beyond the speed of light. If something does enter it, it will vanish without a trace–yet if the enveloped object emits anything after being gone, that emission or traces of its existence cannot be traced as it also will be enveloped. Simply put, the Hawking Radiation theory now has been able to be simulated in a lab where “the positive particle of a virtual particle pair released from the event horizon of a black hole after the negative one is absorbed”.
If it were not for the ingenuity of the UK’s University of St. Andrews, and with their Professor Ulf Leonhardt and his colleagues, the ability to look inside a simulated black hole at the University’s lab and to perform experiments, would never have been made possible. And the 30-year old black hole prediction of Stephen Hawking would never have been able to be simulated in order to better understand it, forcing it to remain an unknown quantum mechanic for the world to simply read about. Both were done with the lab development of the “laser black hole”, allowing physicists to examine what happens to light on both sides of the event horizon, impossible to do in astrophysics.
Mimicking a black hole in a lab has been made possible with a supercooled substance called “Bose-Einstein condensate” or BEC. The process involves the manipulation of one region of the BEC where it moves faster than the speed of sound, and sound waves which travel through the rest of the BEC cannot keep up. These sound waves will then become trapped behind an event horizon. If the simulation is done correctly, at this boundary the Hawking radiation could be shown as the production of particle-like packets of vibrational energy called phonons. And Hawking’s radiation theory that he gave in 1974 was successfully accomplished because of this, through a BEC computer simulation at the University of Trento in Italy, with lacopo Carusotto and his colleagues, demonstrating that phonons do appear at the event horizon—and the one member of the pair falls into the simulated “black hole” while the other remains outside, as Hawking predicted. The confirmation of the entanglement in both partners was proven because of the creation of identical density patterns of both phonon parts.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 1:12 am and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
