This Letter introduces a synergistic combination of analytical and numerical methods to study the Hawking effect in optical systems containing the analog of a white-black hole pair. Our analytical treatment, based on techniques from Gaussian quantum information, provides a simple and efficient model to describe all aspects of the out-state, including the entanglement between any bipartition. We complement the study with a numerical analysis and apply our tools to investigate the influence that ambient thermal noise and detector inefficiencies have on the out-state. We find that aspects of the Hawking effect that are of quantum origin, i.e., quantum entanglement, are extremely fragile to the influence of inefficiencies and noise. We propose a protocol to amplify and observe these quantum aspects, based on seeding the process with a single-mode squeezed input, opening the door to new possibilities for experimental verification of the Hawking effect.
This Letter introduces a synergistic combination of analytical and numerical methods to study the Hawking effect in optical systems containing the analog of a white-black hole pair. Our analytical treatment, based on techniques from Gaussian quantum information, provides a simple and efficient model to describe all aspects of the out-state, including the entanglement between any bipartition. We complement the study with a numerical analysis and apply our tools to investigate the influence that ambient thermal noise and detector inefficiencies have on the out-state. We find that aspects of the Hawking effect that are of quantum origin, i.e., quantum entanglement, are extremely fragile to the influence of inefficiencies and noise. We propose a protocol to amplify and observe these quantum aspects, based on seeding the process with a single-mode squeezed input, opening the door to new possibilities for experimental verification of the Hawking effect.
This work introduces a synergistic combination of analytical methods and numerical simulations to study the propagation of weak wave-packet modes in an optical medium containing the analog of a pair white-black hole. We apply our tools to analyze several aspects of the evolution, such as (i) the region of the parameter space where the analogy with the Hawking effect is on firm ground and (ii) the influence that ambient thermal noise and detector inefficiencies have on the observability of the Hawking effect. We find that aspects of the Hawking effect that are of quantum origin, such as quantum entanglement, are extremely fragile to the influence of inefficiencies and noise. We propose a protocol to amplify and observe these quantum aspects, based on seeding the process with a single-mode squeezed input.
The Hawking effect is an exciting physical prediction lying at the intersection of the two most successful theories of the past century, namely, Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. In this dissertation, we put special emphasis on the quantum aspects of the Hawking process encoded in the entanglement shared by the emitted fluxes of created quanta. In particular, we employ sharp tools from quantum information theory to quantify the entanglement produced by the Hawking effect throughout the black hole evaporation process. Our framework allows us to extend previous calculations of entanglement to a larger set of cases, for instance, the situation where a black hole is immersed in a thermal bath, such as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and the quantum state of infalling radiation is, therefore, mixed. Motivated by recent intense experimental efforts, we extend our framework to the case of an optical white-black hole pair analog gravity system created by a strong electromagnetic pulse propagating in a non-linear dielectric medium. One of the main results presented in this dissertation is the development of a numerical code that recreates the Hawking process in such an optical analog. Utilizing this code together with our quantum information tools, we study how different input quantum states of light alter the amount of the entanglement produced in the Hawking pairs. We find that although ambient thermal noise and detector inefficiencies, unsurprisingly, tend to reduce quantum correlations in the Hawking process, when horizons are illuminated with single-mode squeezed states of light, the entanglement generated increases in a tunable manner. As a last application in optical analogs, we investigate the laser configuration in which two strong electromagnetic pulses propagate in a non-linear dielectric medium exchanging Hawking quanta, thus, stimulating each other. In such a setup, we observe that not only the number of Hawking quanta created is exponentially increased but also the entanglement shared between the mode of the electromagnetic field inside the laser cavity with the modes of the field outside the cavity grows with time. We conclude that these novel results open a promising window for the observability of the quantum origin of the Hawking effect in the lab.
In this work, we describe optically inspired models for unitary black hole (BH) evaporation. The goal of these models are (i) to be operationally simple, (ii) approximately preserve the thermal nature of the emitted Hawking Radiation (HR), and (iii) attempt to reproduce the Page Curve that purports that information flows forth from the BH when it has evaporated to approximately half its initial mass. We concentrate on modeling the BH as a single mode squeezed state successively interacting, by means of beam splitters and squeezers, with vacuum modes near the horizon, giving rise to entangled pairs representing the external Hawking radiation and its partner particle inside the horizon. Since all states and operations are Gaussian throughout, we use a symplectic formalism to track the evolution of the composite system through the evolving means and variances of their quadrature operators. This allows us to easily compute correlations and entanglement between the BH and the HR, as well as calculate correlations between the BH at early and late times.
We introduce a convenient set of analytical tools (the Gaussian formalism) and diagrams (symplectic circuits) to analyze multimode scattering events in analogue gravity, such as pair creation \`a la Hawking by black hole and white hole analogue event horizons. The diagrams prove to be valuable Ans\"atze for the scattering dynamics, especially in settings where direct analytic results are not straightforward and one must instead rely on numerical simulations. We use these tools to investigate entanglement generation in single- and multihorizon scenarios, in particular when the Hawking process is stimulated with classical (e.g., thermal noise) and nonclassical (e.g., single-mode squeezed vacuum) input states---demonstrating, for instance, that initial squeezing can enhance the production of entanglement and overcome the deleterious effects that initial thermal fluctuations have on the output entanglement. To make further contact with practical matters, we examine how attenuation degrades quantum correlations between Hawking pairs. The techniques that we employ are generally applicable to analogue gravity setups of (Gaussian) bosonic quantum systems, such as analogue horizons produced in optical analogues and in Bose-Einstein condensates, and should be of great utility in these domains. We show the applicability of these techniques by putting them in action for an optical system containing a pair white-black hole analogue, extending our previous analysis of [Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 091301 (2022)].
Hawking radiation is a fundamental spontaneous phenomenon in which the event horizon of a black hole transforms the vacuum state into a pair of correlated particles: the Hawking radiation and its partner. This emission can also be stimulated by a state other than the vacuum. A similar phenomenon, known as analogue Hawking radiation, has been observed across various physical systems, but experimental realizations have largely remained in the classical regime. This work presents an experimental verification of analogue Hawking radiation stimulated by a single-particle state, producing a verifiably single-photon Hawking output. Using heralded single photons generated via spontaneous four-wave mixing, we stimulate the analogue Hawking effect in an optical fiber. We characterize the resulting Hawking signal by measuring its spectral dependence, intensity scaling, and heralded second-order correlation. Our results establish a platform for exploring quantum correlations and entanglement in analogue gravity. Researchers experimentally demonstrate analogue Hawking radiation stimulated by a single photon in an optical fiber. This work enables new studies of quantum effects in nonlinear optics and analogue gravity.
The influence of Hawking radiation on quantum entanglement for bimodal Gaussian states near a Schwarzschild black hole is investigated. It is shown that for a thermal squeezed state of a bimodal bosonic system the Hawking radiation reduces and even can destroy the entanglement between the mode of a Kruskal observer Alice and the mode of Bob, who is an accelerated observer hovering outside the event horizon of black hole. By contrary, the Hawking radiation increases and even can generate quantum entanglement between Bob and anti-Bob, who is a hypothetical observer inside event horizon. We show that in both these scenarios the competition between the contrary influences produced by Hawking temperature, squeezing and field frequency, may favour the preservation of the quantum entanglement. We investigate also the influence of the thermal environment on the behaviour in time of the entanglement between the considered observers and show that the entanglement is destroyed in a finite time for both considered bipartite scenarios of observers Alice and Bob, and respectively Bob and anti-Bob, for non-zero values of the temperature of the thermal environment, i.e. the phenomenon of entanglement sudden death takes place. For a zero temperature of the thermal bath the initial existing entanglement is decreasing over time, but it keeps for all finite times a non-zero value and the logarithmic negativity tends to zero only in the limit of infinite time.