Numerical observation of Hawking radiation from acoustic black holes

por Iacopo Carusotto (CNR-INFM BEC Center and Dip. di Fisica, Univ. di Trento (Italy))

miércoles 18 jun. 2008 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

Sala Seminarios (Dpto. de Física Teórica (UVEG))

Although the existence of black-holes has been indirectly proven on astrophysical grounds, no experimental evidence of their slow but relentless evaporation into Hawking radiation has been obtained yet. In the present talk we report numerical simulations of a condensed matter system which shares many properties with gravitational black-holes, in particular the emission of a Hawking radiation: an horizon is created in a moving cloud of ultracold atoms in the nanoKelvin range where atoms behave in a coherent way as a Bose-Einstein condensate, and the presence of Hawking radiation is inferred from peculiar correlations of the quantum fluctuations of the atomic density.