Gravitational Analogues: Proving the Existence of Hawking Radiation

Synopsis

Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes had to follow the same thermodynamics we see in laboratory experiments and are not black after all but emit what is now known as Hawking radiation. In this talk we will introduce the idea of analogue gravitation, why Hawking radiation is being regarded as a more general phenomenon than just in black holes, and how it's being used to prove the existence of Hawking radiation[1][2] from a black hole through laboratory experiments known as analog systems[3] instead of directly through telescopes.  

[1] Bermudez, D., & Leonhardt, U. (2016). Hawking spectrum for a fiber-optical analog of the event horizon. Physical Review A, 93, 053820. 

[2] Drori, J., Rosenberg, Y., Bermudez, D., Silberberg, Y., & Leonhardt, U. (2019). Observation of Stimulated Hawking Radiation in an Optical Analogue. Physical Review Letters, 122, 010404. 

[3] Robertson, S. J. (2012). The theory of Hawking radiation in laboratory analogues. Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, 45, 163001.