NEW ORLEANS — Black holes and superfluids make for strange bedfellows: One is famous for being so dense that light can’t escape, and the other is a bizarre liquid that flows without friction. But new computer simulations confirm that superfluid helium follows an unusual rule known from black holes — one with mysterious significance for physics.
Scientists demonstrated that entropy, a measure of the information contained in a system, behaves in a counterintuitive way in superfluid helium. Entropy grows at the same rate as the surface area of the superfluid helium, instead of its volume — mimicking how the entropy of a black hole grows as it gobbles up matter and expands. It’s the first time the phenomenon, known as the “area law,” has been demonstrated in simulations of a naturally occurring state of matter. Physicists reported the result March 14 at a meeting of the American Physical Society and March 13 in Nature Physics.