Simulating a Black Hole

Never mind the Nobel Prize, there's clearly some kind of secret "most awesome sounding research" award - and a team from St Andrews are after both. They used a laser system to simulate black holes, and that concept has actually broken the laws of incredible because you couldn't make it sound any cooler even if you added cheerleaders and Optimus Prime.

Don't panic at the phrase "tabletop black holes" - the Earth won't get sucked into a cosmological trash compacter if one of the researchers hits the wrong switch. The laser system creates a situation which parallels the event horizon of a black hole without - and this is important - actually being a gravitational singularity from which nothing has any hope of escaping.

Two laser pulses are fired down a specially constructed optical fiber. The second is much faster and should rapidly overtake the first - but it can't. In a quantum effect that would make Zeno proud, the first pulse alters the speed at which light can pass through the material (in Science-ese: the refractive index is modified via the optical Kerr effect) and so the closer the second pulse gets, the stronger the effect becomes, creating an impassable barrier - a barrier like the event horizon of a black hole.

Saying "it sounds similar so we can research that instead" might not appear to be the most rigorous method in the world, but this isn't a case of hand-waving resemblance - the mathematics of the quantum catastrophe singularity created in the fiber exactly corresponds to the spacetime singularity of a black hole, in an analogy so perfectly crafted it makes Shakespeare look like a monkey with a typewriter. The quantum catastrophe singularity is therefore an accessible research tool for what - till now - was the ultimate "you can't have one in the lab" system. Quantum catastrophe singularity is also the best phrase we've ever heard, ever, and we fully intend to use it as often as possible.

The research team, led by Professor Ulf Leonhardt, first hope to investigate Hawking radiation - proof of which would see King of Cosmology, Professor Stephen Hawking, land a Nobel prize. To which any reasonable person would respond "What? You mean he doesn't have one yet?" Apparently not - an oversight the Scottland-based team intend to rectify.

And one more time: quantum catastrophe singularity.

Posted by Luke McKinney.