The Spacetime Metric

In one minute

Philbin, Leonhardt and colleagues build on the fact that an event horizon behaves like waves in a moving medium: a horizon forms wherever the medium moves faster than the waves. Their picture is a river flowing towards a waterfall, where beyond some point waves can no longer travel upstream. Using ultrashort pulses in microstructured optical fibres, they demonstrate an artificial event horizon made of light. They observe a classical optical effect, light blue-shifting at a white-hole horizon. Theoretical calculations show the same system can probe the quantum effects of horizons, in particular Hawking radiation.

Fiber-Optical Analog of the Event Horizon

  1. Thomas G. Philbin(Author)
  2. Chris Kuklewicz(Author)
  3. Scott Robertson(Author)
  4. Stephen Hill(Author)
  5. Friedrich König(Author)
  6. Ulf Leonhardt(Author)

Publication and identifiers

Work type
Paper
Year
2008

Rights and access

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Recorded rights status
Linking only
Rights holder
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Citation fields

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Original title
Fiber-Optical Analog of the Event Horizon
Attribution
  1. Thomas G. Philbin(Author)
  2. Chris Kuklewicz(Author)
  3. Scott Robertson(Author)
  4. Stephen Hill(Author)
  5. Friedrich König(Author)
  6. Ulf Leonhardt(Author)
Year
2008