Semianr on Disorder and strong electron correlations: "Numerical observation of Hawking radiation from acoustic black holes in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates"
Starts 24 Apr 2008 12:00
Ends 24 Apr 2008 20:00
Central European Time
ICTP
Leonardo da Vinci Building Seminar Room
Strada Costiera, 11
I - 34151 Trieste (Italy)
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: a 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.