By Peter Weiss
Physicists may soon create artificial black holes in the laboratory, analogous to the ones expected to lurk in distant space. A new study by a pair of theorists in Sweden describes how swirling clouds of atoms could slug down all nearby light, making them as black as their astronomical cousins.
Called optical black holes, these eddies could provide an extraordinary test-bench for the theory of general relativity, which gave rise to the concept of gravitational black holes, the researchers say. Ulf Leonhardt and Paul Piwnicki of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm find that the same mathematics describes both the terrible tug of an astronomical black hole on light and the gentle corralling of rays by an atom vortex.
“We were quite surprised that it worked that well,” Piwnicki says. “We’re still working on it to understand it more deeply,” he adds. The researchers report their findings in the Jan. 31 Physical Review Letters and the December 1999 Physical Review A.