ANALOGUE GRAVITY
About Analogue gravity. Black holes are among the most fascinating predictions of modern physics. They are known to "eat" everything that is around them and not even light can escape. However, they are not completely "one-way" systems. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes emit radiation, now known as the celebrated Hawking effect [8].
Ten years later, it was shown by Bill Unruh that systems that can be realized in the laboratory (i.e., flowing water tanks) can be manipulated to exhibit regimes where small perturbations (i.e., surface ripples) propagate as if on a curved space-time and in the presence of a black hole [9]. This opened a huge avenue opportunities, namely the possibility of testing Hawking's prediction in systems that are experimentally accessible so far (nobody has volunteered to fall in a black hole to see what happens, never being able to come back out and tell us what they witnessed...). In particular, new systems were found that could be led to exhibit these regimes, for example light wave guides and Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs); these systems are now commonly employed in laboratories across the globe to study features typical of gravitational processes.
Great progress has been made and analogue radiation from analogue black holes has been observed. However, its most prominent feature, the quantum character of the correlations trademark of this radiation, are hard to be observed.
I have contributed to this area of research by providing a simple analytical understanding of the role of the initial temperature of the system that is being used (temperature that can never be brought to zero) and how this affects the correlations in the analogue radiation. My work is the first to give the experimental groups a temperature threshold above which no matter how good they are, they cannot observe quantum correlations.
Ten years later, it was shown by Bill Unruh that systems that can be realized in the laboratory (i.e., flowing water tanks) can be manipulated to exhibit regimes where small perturbations (i.e., surface ripples) propagate as if on a curved space-time and in the presence of a black hole [9]. This opened a huge avenue opportunities, namely the possibility of testing Hawking's prediction in systems that are experimentally accessible so far (nobody has volunteered to fall in a black hole to see what happens, never being able to come back out and tell us what they witnessed...). In particular, new systems were found that could be led to exhibit these regimes, for example light wave guides and Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs); these systems are now commonly employed in laboratories across the globe to study features typical of gravitational processes.
Great progress has been made and analogue radiation from analogue black holes has been observed. However, its most prominent feature, the quantum character of the correlations trademark of this radiation, are hard to be observed.
I have contributed to this area of research by providing a simple analytical understanding of the role of the initial temperature of the system that is being used (temperature that can never be brought to zero) and how this affects the correlations in the analogue radiation. My work is the first to give the experimental groups a temperature threshold above which no matter how good they are, they cannot observe quantum correlations.
References
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- "Alice falls into a black hole", I. Fuentes-Schuller and R. Mann, Physical Review Letters 95: 120404 (2005)
- "Lorentz Invariance of Entanglement", P. M. Alsing, G. J. Milburn, arXiv:quant-ph/0203051v1 (2002)
- "Quantum Entropy", A. Peres, P. F. Scudo, D. R. Terno, Physical Review Letters 88: 230402 (2002)
- "Notes on black-hole evaporation". W.G. Unruh, Physical Review D 14 (4): 870 (1976)
- "Quantum Cryptography: Public key distribution and coin tossing", C. H. Bennett and G. Brassard, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computers, Systems, and Signal Processing, Bangalore, p. 175 (1984)
- Quantum Information and Communication European roadmap: http://qurope.eu/projects/quie2t/wp2/deliverables;
Roadmap of Quantum ICT Laboratory of National Institute of Information and Communications Technology of Japan: http://www.nict.go.jp/en/advanced\_ict/quantum/roadmap.html;
Quantum Information Science and Technology Roadmap of USA: http://qist.lanl.gov/qcomp\_map.shtml - "Quantum communication with an accelerated partner", T. G. Downes, T. C. Ralph and N. Walk, Phys. Rev. A 87, 012327 (2013)
- "Black hole explosions?", Hawking, S. W., Nature 248 (5443): 30 (1974).
- "Experimental black hole evaporation”, Unruh, W.G., Phys. Rev. Lett., 46, 1351–1353, (1981).