Scientific Calendar Event



Starts 23 Jun 2009 13:00
Ends 23 Jun 2009 20:00
Central European Time
Lecture Room D - SISSA Main Building
Hawking radiation in black holes is the most famous and elusive prediction of Quantum Field Theory in curved spacetime, but so far no experiment is confirming its existence. More fundamental than the theory it has been first derived, Hawking radiation has been extended to any system able to reproduce the geometrical features of a forming black hole specetime: for example in supersonic flowing fluids the sound gets trapped exactly as light in a black hole. Such supersonic flow configurations are called "acoustic black holes" and can be used as laboratory to test gravitational effects otherwise undetectable (as Hawking radiation). It has been recently proposed how a clear signature of the presence of Hawking radiation in acoustic black holes appears in the density correlation pattern, analytically obtained using the formal analogy between gravitation and hydrodynamics, and numerically confirmed in an analysis able to take into account the full microscopic structure of the system. In this seminar the main features of the analogy between gravitation and hydrodynamics are reviewed. Then the peculiar correlation pattern associated to Hawking radiation is showed, and its important role to reveal it in near future experiments is underlined.