Black hole recipe: Slow light, swirl atoms

William George Unruh, Ralf Schützhold

Ralf Schützhold, William George Unruh

Katherine Wright

William George Unruh, Ralf Schützhold

Although slow light (electromagnetically induced transparency) would seem an ideal medium in which to institute a ``dumb hole'' (black hole analogue), it suffers from a number of problems. We show that the high phase velocity in the slow light regime ensures that the system cannot be used as an analogue displaying Hawking radiation. Even though an appropriately designed slow-light setup may simulate classical features of black holes---such as horizon, mode mixing, ``Bogoliubov'' coefficients, etc.---it does not reproduce the related quantum effects.

Ulf Leonhardt

Laboratory-based optical analogs of astronomical objects such as black holes rely on the creation of light with an extremely low or even vanishing group velocity (slow light). These brief notes represent a pedagogical attempt towards elucidating this extraordinary form of light. This paper is a contribution to the book Artificial Black Holes edited by Mario Novello, Matt Visser and Grigori Volovik. The paper is intended as a primer, an introduction to the subject for non-experts, not as a detailed literature review.

J. P. Marangos