Analogue black holes for light rays in static dielectrics

Abstract

Propagation of light in nonlinear materials is here studied in the regime of the geometrical optics. It is shown that a spherically symmetric medium at rest with some specific dielectric properties can be used to produce an exact analogue model for a class of space-times which includes spherically symmetric and static black hole solutions. The optical model here presented can be a useful tool to reproduce in laboratory the behavior of optical null geodesics near a compact object with an observable gravitational Schwarzschild radius.

5 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (4)

• Measurement of stimulated Hawking emission in an analogue system
• Hawking radiation from ultrashort laser pulse filaments
• Trapping light by mimicking gravitational lensing
• Dielectric Analog Space-Times

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Metric Relativity and the Dynamical Bridge: highlights of Riemannian geometry in physics
• Photon propagation in a material medium on a curved spacetime
• Photon traps in nonlinear electrodynamics
• Mimicking a rotating black hole with nonlinear electrodynamics
• Nonlinear electrodynamics in magnetars: systematic effects on radius constraints and timing analysis