Could 'black hole' in a lab finally help Stephen Hawking win a Nobel Prize?
An artist's concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole CREDIT: NASA
But such is the weakness of the emitted particle combined with the remoteness of even the nearest of black holes, his mathematical discovery has yet to be verified by observation.
Instead Jeff Steinhauer, professor of physics at the Technion university in Haifa, created something analagous to a “black hole” for sound in his laboratory.
In a paper published on the physics website arXiv, and reported by The Times, he described how he cooled helium to close to absolute zero before manipulating it in such a way that sound could not cross it, like a black hole's event horizon.
He said he found evidence that phonons – the sound equivalent of light's photons - were leaking out, rather as Prof Hawking had predicted for black holes.
The results have yet to be replicated elsewhere and scientists say they will want to check the effect is not caused by another factor.
If confirmed, it would strengthen Prof Hawking's case for science's greatest prize.
Although his theory has a lot of support, Nobel Prizes for Physics are not awarded without experimental proof.
Earlier this year, Prof Hawking used the BBC's Reith Lecture to make the case that his work was close to being proven, both in the laboratory and from echoes of the very earliest moments of our universe.
“I am resigned to the fact that I won’t see proof of Hawking radiation directly.
“There are solid state analogues of black holes and other effects, that the Nobel committee might accept as proof,” he said. “But there’s another kind of Hawking radiation, coming from the cosmological event horizon of the early inflationary universe.
“I am now studying whether one might detect Hawking radiation in primordial gravitational waves . . . so I might get a Nobel prize after all.”
Source: Telegraph.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment