Non gravitational black holes

Abstract

Analogue models of general relativity have recently been considered with great interest by the scientific community. They connect branches of physics as different as gravitation, condensed matter physics, electrodynamics, acoustics, and quantum field theory. One of the main expectations about such models lies on the possibility of testing in laboratory some aspects of quantum field theory in curved spacetimes. For instance, it seems to be possible to probe the existence of Hawking radiation by means of analogue models in the context of certain condensed matter systems. We briefly report the present day status of this topic of research. Some specific models are considered, particularly those presenting analogue event horizons as solutions. The issue of thermal emission (analogue Hawking radiation) is also discussed.

Analogue black holes for light rays in static dielectrics

“…In this case several models describing different solutions of general relativity were obtained. For instance, almost axially symmetric optical analogues of Schwarzschild black holes are already known [13][14][15]. For these models, the occurrence of an event horizon is fundamentally dependent upon the vortical motion of the dielectric fluid.…”

Thermal Radiation From a Fluctuating Event Horizon

“…In particular, the possibility of constructing an acoustic analog of a black hole and measuring sound waves with thermal spectrum can provide an experimental verification of the existence of Hawking radiation in a condensed matter setting. In this respect, there exist interesting recent proposals to generate an acoustic metric with sonic horizon in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and other superfluids [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

The light rays analogue of a static black hole1)

“…Equation (1) is known as Gordon geometry (or Gordon metric) [2,3]. Generalizations of this result to produce black hole-like solutions are already known, being either kinematical [5,6,7] (for which the geometrical content is strongly dependent upon the motion of the medium) or static [8,9,10] (optical properties strongly dependent upon the metamaterial character of the medium). The aim of the present work is to investigate further the possibility of building an exact analogue model of a black hole within a static medium.…”