Physicist Discovers How To Make Quantum Foam In A Test Tube - Technology Review

Physicist Discovers How To Make Quantum Foam In A Test Tube - Technology Review: "It turns out that there is a close similarity between the way light is effected by the curvature of spacetime and the way it is influenced by the electromagnetic "space" inside a metamaterial. In fact, there is a formal mathematical analogy between these things. So the behaviour of photons inside a metamaterial is identical to their behaviour in space-time...
So his idea is to create a metamaterial in which the dielectric permittivity is just blow this critical value. Then any thermal fluctuations inside the material ought to raise the permittivity, making the material opaque in that region.
So any photons caught in that region will be trapped. 'They experience total internal reflection at any incidence angle,' says Smolyaninov.
That region is therefore an analogue of a black hole. And the fact that these black holes will spring in and out of existence as the temperature naturally fluctuates means that the metamaterial behaves like quantum foam."