Sonic Black Holes and other Science News

The scientific journal Nature published news of the discovery of hawking radiation in artificial black holes. We made this the main topic of our first journal club meeting and discussed Jeff Steinhauer's paper on artificial black holes [1]. He presents evidence of Hawking radiation emitted from sonic black holes in Bose-Einstein Condensates (BCEs). The BCE is accelerated to supersonic speeds within the artificial black hole, while outside the black hole the BCE is moving at subsonic speeds. The boundary between these two regions is a sonic event horizon. Phonons that cross the event horizon and travel into the black hole cannot escape it again. Steinhauer observed Hawking radiation from this analogue back hole which comes from entangled phonons that are separated by the event horizon.

In other science news was the discovery of a potentially habitable exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri. We agreed to make this the topic of our main discussion in the next journal club meeting.

This journal club meeting took place on the 25th August 2016, 12-1pm in the XY-Café at the KB. Number of attendees: 7. The paper was picked by Jenny.

[1]  J. Steinhauer. "Obseration of quantum Hawking radiation and its entanglement in an analogue black hole" Nature Physics (2016), doi:10.1038/nphys3863, Published online 15 August 2016