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Hawking radiation–like effect seen around artificial black hole

AUG 16, 2016
Physics Today

Nature : One of Stephen Hawking’s most famous predictions is that black holes evaporate and disappear due to the emission of radiation. That radiation has not been spotted directly, but now an analog to the phenomenon has been detected escaping from an artificial black hole. Created by Jeff Steinhauer of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, the so-called black hole is a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) of supercooled rubidium atoms. The event horizon is created by accelerating the atoms until they exceed the speed of sound in the medium. Steinhauer says that the BEC then experiences quantum fluctuations of pairs of entangled phonons on either side of the event horizon.

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