Paderborn: Physicists at Paderborn University in Germany, led by Lorenzo Procopio, have successfully simulated a black hole in a laboratory setting, observing an analog of Hawking radiation backreaction. Their groundbreaking findings have been published in the journal Nature.

According to Iraqi News Agency, black holes are among the most complex entities in the Universe due to their dense nature, which produces a gravitational pull that is nearly impossible to escape. First proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking in 1974, Hawking radiation is a predicted phenomenon involving black-body radiation that arises from quantum effects near a black hole’s event horizon. The mechanism of energy transfer from a black hole to this radiation has been a subject of scientific inquiry.

Direct observation of Hawking radiation remains unfeasible due to its expected faintness, which blends with the Universe’s background radiation. To overcome this challenge, physicists have devised creative laboratory systems that replicate the physics of black holes. These analogs range from simple setups like water swirling down a drain to more complex systems such as ultracold Bose-Einstein condensates or atomic chains that mimic the event horizon’s physics.

Previous experiments have successfully recreated Hawking radiation; however, this recent study focused on the subtle backreaction that indicates how energy transfers from the analog black hole to the emitted radiation. The study challenges earlier beliefs that Hawking radiation in black hole analogs emerged through complex optical interactions, suggesting instead a direct process that naturally explains both the radiation and backreaction.

The researchers note in their paper, “Our experiment and the underlying theory show that Hawking radiation is the result of a direct process, if the interaction between the radiation and the equivalent of the gravitational field is biquadratic.” They propose that astrophysical black holes might radiate through a similarly simple process, with the resulting backreaction offering microscopic insights into black hole evaporation.