Quantum Analogues

About The Workshop

What have water waves, Bose-Einstein condensates, semiconductor polaritons and fibre optics in common with black holes and the expanding universe? They are all quantum analogues. An analogue is a physical system that mimics the physics of another system. For example, water going down the drain establishes the analogue of the event horizon for water waves if the flow velocity exceeds the wave velocity. Quantum analogues mimic not only the classical physics of another system, but the quantum physics. For example, Bose-Einstein condensates may produce the quantum Hawking radiation of black holes. The Hawking radiation of real black holes is all but obscured by the Cosmic Microwave Background (and even more so by accretion radiation) but not so in black hole analogues, and neither is particle creation and the Gibbons-Hawking radiation of the expanding universe. Laboratory analogues have given us a good, hands-on understanding of how these quantum processes work, that are critical to the connection between quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and gravity. These ideas have a good chance of resolving the recent tensions in cosmology by predicting of how the quantum vacuum generates what is called dark energy (for want of a more enlightening term). Quantum analogues have also become a meeting place of different communities, from fluid mechanics to astronomy, where ideas are exchanged that would otherwise remain in their scholarly boundaries, and where young researchers are educated to be open-mind.

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