Hawking radiation glimpsed in artificial black hole: To create their lab-scale event horizon, Daniele Faccio of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, Francesco Belgiorno of the University of Milan, Italy, and their colleagues focused ultrashort pulses of infrared laser light at a wavelength of 1055 nanometres into a piece of glass. The extremely high intensity of these pulses – trillions of times that of sunlight – temporarily skews the properties of the glass. In particular, it boosts the glass's refractive index, the extent to which the glass slows down light travelling through it.
The result is a moving point of very high refractive index, equivalent to a physical hill, which acts as a horizon. Photons entering the glass behind this "hill", including ones that are part of a virtual pair, slow as they climb the hill and are unable to pass through it. Relative to the slow-moving pulse, they have come to a stop and remain behind the pulse until it has passed through the glass's length.
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