The result gives researchers a rare, hands-on look at Hawking radiation — the faint thermal emission that Stephen Hawking predicted should leak out of black holes — and offers a first clue about the tiny push that could, in principle, make a real black hole slowly evaporate, the research team said in a new study.
According to the new study, published July 1 in the journal Nature, the light behaved exactly as Hawking predicted it should: like the glow of a warm object, with a definite temperature and a spectrum that fades away steadily toward higher frequencies. It did so even in a regime where the usual textbook description of a black hole should break down.
An infographic explaining how Hawking radiation works, contrary to the predictions of general relativity. (Image credit: ALAIN BOMMENEL,VALENTINA BRESCHI,WILLIAM ICKES via Getty Images)"Jacob Bekenstein predicted that black holes have an entropy and a temperature, and Hawking calculated the thermal radiation of the black hole," study co-author Ulf Leonhardt, a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told Live Science via email. "In Hawking-Bekenstein radiation, quantum physics, general relativity and thermodynamics come together — subjects that are normally in conflict with each other."
That combination is exactly what makes Hawking radiation so hard to study. Astronomers have never seen Hawking radiation from a real black hole and probably never will; the glow is far too faint to pick out across the cosmos. So physicists have turned to laboratory stand-ins that obey the same equations, building black hole analogues out of flowing water, ultracold atoms and, as in this study, light.
Physicist Stephen Hawking that black holes should be able to lose information through an elusive type of radiation. New research zooms in on the mechanism that makes it possible. (Image credit: Bryan Bedder / Stringer via Getty Images)Building a black hole from light
A black hole's event horizon is the boundary where that current — space itself, in real life — starts moving faster than anything can travel. To recreate it, the team needed a material that appears to rush along at the speed of light. Their solution was elegant: use light to make the "material."
In practice, the researchers fired an intense, ultrashort "pump" pulse into a thin photonic-crystal fiber — a strand of glass threaded with a pattern of tiny air channels running along its length, which lets researchers fine-tune how light moves through it. As it traveled, the pulse slightly changed how the glass bent light, creating a moving speed bump that raced along with it. A second, much weaker "probe" pulse then ran into this moving front. Where the probe could no longer keep up, an artificial horizon formed — and the black hole analogue was born.
"We counted photons in the ultraviolet that correspond to the Hawking partners beyond the horizon," Leonhardt explained. "They have a wavelength around 233 nanometers. This was our signal."
Because energy has to come from somewhere, making Hawking radiation should nudge the source that created it. For a real black hole, that nudge is how it loses mass and, over unimaginable timescales, evaporates entirely — the process Hawking described in his landmark 1974 paper. No experiment had ever captured that recoil.
The road to a quantum experiment
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"Any light getting away from the horizon is stretched out enormously," Leonhardt said. "So it must come from waves smaller than the tiniest scale in nature, where the physics is unknown. Would that still give Hawking radiation? That was the question, and we have answered it in our experiment." Remarkably, the glow stayed perfectly thermal even in this extreme regime.
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