Quantum catastrophe of slow light
arXiv:physics/0111058 · doi:10.1038/415406a
Abstract
Catastrophes are at the heart of many fascinating optical phenomena. The rainbow, for example, is a ray catastrophe where light rays become infinitely intense. The wave nature of light resolves the infinities of ray catastrophes while drawing delicate interference patterns such as the supernumerary arcs of the rainbow. Black holes cause wave singularities. Waves oscillate with infinitely small wave lengths at the event horizon where time stands still. The quantum nature of light avoids this higher level of catastrophic behaviour while producing a quantum phenomenon known as Hawking radiation. As this letter describes, light brought to a standstill in laboratory experiments can suffer a similar wave singularity caused by a parabolic profile of the group velocity. In turn, the quantum vacuum is forced to create photon pairs with a characteristic spectrum. The idea may initiate a theory of quantum catastrophes, in addition to classical catastrophe theory, and the proposed experiment may lead to the first direct observation of a phenomenon related to Hawking radiation.
Published as "A laboratory analogue of the event horizon using slow light in an atomic medium"
References in corpus (3)
Cited by in corpus (67)
- Fiber-optical analogue of the event horizon
- General Relativity in Electrical Engineering
- Observation of self-amplifying Hawking radiation in an analog black hole laser
- Realization of a sonic black hole analogue in a Bose-Einstein condensate
- Gravitational Decoherence
- Quantum Physics of Simple Optical Instruments
- Using Berry's phase to detect the Unruh effect at lower accelerations
- On Slow Light as a Black Hole Analogue
- The theory of Hawking radiation in laboratory analogues
- GUP Assisted Hawking Radiation of Rotating Acoustic Black Holes
- Large Fizeau's light-dragging effect in a moving electromagnetically induced transparent medium
- Acoustic Black Holes from Abelian Higgs Model with Lorentz Symmetry Breaking
- Geometric phase for an accelerated two-level atom and the Unruh effect
- Decoherence, Autler-Townes effect, and dark states in two-tone driving of a three-level superconducting system
- Transverse Fresnel-Fizeau drag effects in strongly dispersive media
- Acoustic black holes for relativistic fluids
- Optical Properties of Layered Superconductors near the Josephson Plasma Resonance
- Quantum vacuum radiation in optical glass
- Dirac Equation in (1+1)-Dimensional Curved Spacetime and the Multiphoton Quantum Rabi Model
- Hawking radiation from "phase horizons" in laser filaments?
- Superresonance effect from a rotating acoustic black hole and Lorentz symmetry breaking
- Supersonic Velocities in Noncommutative Acoustic Black Holes
- Optical analogues of black-hole horizons
- Reduction of entanglement degradation and teleportation improvement in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity
- Tunneling through a parabolic barrier viewed from Wigner phase space
- The entropy of the noncommutative acoustic black hole based on generalized uncertainty principle
- Analogue Aharonov-Bohm effect in neo-Newtonian theory
- Trapped surfaces and emergent curved space in the Bose-Hubbard model
- The Theory of Optical Black Hole Lasers
- Quantum catastrophes and ergodicity in the dynamics of bosonic Josephson junctions
- Open static Chaplygin universe
- Quantum-corrected rotating acoustic black holes in Lorentz-violating background
- Analogue simulation of gravitational waves in a 3+1 dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate
- Theory of a Slow-Light Catastrophe
- Quantum caustics and the hierarchy of light cones in quenched spin chains
- Caustics in quantum many-body dynamics
- The Unruh effect in slow motion
- Hawking radiation in optics and beyond
- In-situ velocity imaging of ultracold atoms using slow--light
- Analytical description of quantum emission in optical analogues to gravity
- Analogue Quantum Simulation: A New Instrument for Scientific Understanding
- Quantum spin dynamics in Fock space following quenches: Caustics and vortices
- Catastrophes in non-equilibrium many-particle wave functions: universality and critical scaling
- Quantum radiation in dielectric media with dispersion and dissipation
- Emergence of singularities from decoherence: Quantum catastrophes
- Optical analogue of the Schwarzschild-Planck metric
- The sonic analogue of black hole radiation
- Aharonov-Bohm effect for a fermion field in a planar black hole "spacetime"
- Can spacetime curvature induced corrections to Lamb shift be observable?
- Fermionic analogue of black hole radiation with a super high Hawking temperature
- Quantum control of EIT dispersion via atomic tunneling in a double-well Bose-Einstein condensate
- Stochastic motion in an expanding noncommutative fluid
- Light, the universe, and everything -- 12 Herculean tasks for quantum cowboys and black diamond skiers
- Towards a classification of wave catastrophes
- Logarithmic catastrophes and Stokes's phenomenon in waves at horizons
- Hawking temperature in dispersive media: Analytical and numerical study
- A Primer to Slow Light
- Simulation of Slow Light with Electronics Circuits
- Quantum Thermometry
- Quantum light propagation in a uniformly moving dissipative slab
- An escape of vector matter-wave soliton from a parabolic trap
- Caustics in the sine-Gordon model from quenches in coupled 1D Bose gases
- Soliton Diffusion as a Signature of Hawking Radiation in Bose-Einstein Condensates
- Experimental demonstration of photonic quantum ratchet
- On the analogy between black holes and bathtub vortices
- Emergence of caustics in dynamics of the Kitaev model
- Optical and Thermodynamic Signatures of Lorentz Symmetry Breaking in Bumblebee AdS Black Holes