The Spacetime Metric

In one minute

In this 2011 review, Barceló, Liberati and Visser explain how waves in materials can follow equations resembling those for fields in curved spacetime. A sufficiently fast fluid flow can prevent sound from travelling upstream, creating an acoustic counterpart of a black-hole horizon. The review compares water waves, ultracold atomic condensates and optical systems, examining where each analogy applies. It reports classical stimulated Hawking emission in water-wave experiments and a sonic horizon in a condensate kept stable for about eight milliseconds. At that time, reproducible detection of spontaneous quantum Hawking radiation remained an experimental target. The authors distinguish this effective geometry for waves from the equations governing gravity itself: reproducing curved-spacetime propagation does not automatically reproduce Einstein’s gravitational dynamics.

Analogue Gravity

  1. Carlos Barceló(Author)
  2. Stefano Liberati(Author)
  3. Matt Visser(Author)

Publication and identifiers

Work type
Paper
Year
2011
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Edition
Living Reviews in Relativity, volume 14, article 3; published 11 May 2011; 2011 update of the 2005 review
Identifiers
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Original title
Analogue Gravity
Attribution
  1. Carlos Barceló(Author)
  2. Stefano Liberati(Author)
  3. Matt Visser(Author)
Year
2011
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Edition
Living Reviews in Relativity, volume 14, article 3; published 11 May 2011; 2011 update of the 2005 review
Identifiers
Original source links

Bibliography associations

A bibliography listing does not establish authorship. Credits appear under attribution.