3:45 PM
4:45 PM
In 1974, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes aren’t really black at all but, instead, emit radiation as a hot body, gradually losing mass in the so-called “Hawking evaporation process.” Further, Hawking’s calculations showed that the emitted radiation is quantum mechanically entangled with the bowels of the black hole itself. Unfortunately, Hawking radiation is faint, and impossible to be observed in astrophysical black holes.
On the other hand, in the 1980’s, a seminal article by William Unruh established that the spontaneous production of entangled Hawking particles actually occurs in any system that can support an effective event horizon. Such systems can be generated in the lab, and fall under the umbrella of “analog gravity systems”. This is an active field guided by experimental progress.
In this talk, I will review these features in a pedagogical manner and summarize some new fundings. Namely, I’ll argue that by illuminating the horizon with squeezed quantum states, one can amplify the production of entanglement in Hawking’s process in a tunable manner. I’ll apply these ideas to the concrete case of analog black holes produced with non-linear crystals. These results open the door to new possibilities of experimental verification of the Hawking effect.