Inspired by Bill Unruh’s talk last week, for Thursday 15 November 2018 we will discuss:
- Jeff Steinhauer: Observation of quantum Hawking radiation and its entanglement in an analogue black hole
We observe spontaneous Hawking radiation, stimulated by quantum vacuum fluctuations, emanating from an analogue black hole in an atomic Bose–Einstein condensate. Correlations are observed between the Hawking particles outside the black hole and the partner particles inside. These correlations indicate an approximately thermal distribution of Hawking radiation. We find that the high-energy pairs are entangled, while the low-energy pairs are not, within the reasonable assumption that excitations with different frequencies are not correlated. The entanglement verifies the quantum nature of the Hawking radiation. The results are consistent with a driven oscillation experiment and a numerical simulation.
- For some theoretical background, see W. G. Unruh: Quantum Noise in Amplifiers and Hawking/Dumb-Hole Radiation as Amplifier Noise [arXiv:1107.2669]