Watch a singularity form in a stretchy soap film - physics-math - 28 May 2014 - New Scientist

Watch a singularity form in a stretchy soap film - physics-math - 28 May 2014 - New Scientist

Curved Spacetime Mimicked on a Chip: Scientific American

Curved Spacetime Mimicked on a Chip: Scientific American: Liu and his collaborators simulated the gravitational lensing of a star on an integrated photonic chip. A layer of clear plastic on the chip acted as a waveguide, confining light to the chip’s surface. To change the index of refraction of the plastic, the researchers had to vary the plastic’s thickness. They did so by heating the plastic and adding polystyrene microspheres before the plastic cooled. Because the plastic rose upwards around the microspheres on cooling, the thickness of the waveguide increased near these miniature balls. The varying index of refraction the team achieved happens to be very similar to the bending of space-time geometry around a massive star...

“This is indeed the first time an exact solution of Einstein's equations was mimicked” using an optical model, says Leonhardt.

'Black holes' of the ocean could curb climate change - environment - 26 September 2013 - New Scientist

'Black holes' of the ocean could curb climate change - environment - 26 September 2013 - New Scientist: Swirling masses of water in the ocean are mathematically the same as the warped regions of space-time around cosmic singularities...

In this so-called photon sphere, light is trapped in loops that spin around the black hole forever.


"The boundaries of water-carrying eddies satisfy the same type of differential equations that the area surrounding black holes do in general relativity..."

The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation - Technology Review

The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation - Technology Review: The question that Beane and co ask is whether the lattice spacing imposes any kind of limitation on the physical processes we see in the universe...

They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That's because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself.

So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles...


"The most striking feature...is that the angular distribution of the highest energy components would exhibit cubic symmetry in the rest frame of the lattice, deviating significantly from isotropy," they say.

First full universe simulation zooms in on dark matter

First full universe simulation zooms in on dark matter: ...the model covers 90 billion light years, which is the size of the universe that we are able to see, and follows 550 billion particles the mass of our Milky Way. This video starts with a large scale view of the distribution of dark matter in the cosmos today, which looks quite homogeneous. But as it zooms in, its structure becomes visible, showing clumps and filaments separated by expanses of void.

The simulation traces the evolution of dark matter as predicted by the standard model of cosmology, from the time the universe was in its infancy to the present. It mimics gravitational forces between all the clumps and the fact that they are moving in an expanding universe.

Blog - Largest-Ever Simulation of the Universe Revealed

Blog - Largest-Ever Simulation of the Universe Revealed: ...These guys have carried out the largest simulation of the universe ever undertaken, consisting of 374 billion particles in a box some 10 gigaparsecs across. That's roughly equivalent to about two thirds the size of the observable universe...


The purpose of the simulation is to reproduce the entire evolution of a universe made largely of cold dark matter to see whether it produces same structures that we see in ours--from the galactic structures to galactic clusters, galactic superclusters and beyond.

The most recent theories predict that our universe ought to have structures on the very largest scales called acoustic baryon oscillations. These are essentially the leftovers of waves in the plasma that existed in the very early universe which became frozen in place as they cooled.

Bolshoi Simulation | Home

Bolshoi Simulation | Home: Due to significant advances in the measurement of the cosmological parameters and in the power and speed of supercomputers and simulation codes over the past half-decade since the Millennium cosmological simulation, the Bolshoi simulation is substantially better in resolution and accuracy. The Principal Investigators of the Bolshoi project, Anatoly Klypin and Joel Primack, and their colleagues anticipate that Bolshoi will become cosmology’s new benchmark simulation for making theoretical predictions that can then be tested against data gathered by observational astronomers.

Physicists Recreate 'End Of Time' in Lab - Technology Review

Physicists Recreate 'End Of Time' in Lab - Technology Review: Metamaterials can be made to behave like ordinary space with two dimensions of space and one of time. But they can also be made to behave like other types of spaces, with two dimensions of time and one of space, for example.

Smolyaninov points out that an interesting situation occurs when these two materials are place end on. If a time dimension is perpendicular to a space dimension, it simply hits a dead end. In other words, time runs out...

So what happens at the end of time? Smolyaninov says that the electromagnetic field simply diverges, which is something of an anticlimax...

Space jets in a bottle

Space jets in a bottle: By compressing and pumping gases such as Helium, Argon, Xenon and normal air, the researchers were able to give the gases the energy needed to propel them into the vessel's space-like vacuum.

Towards the end of the 4m vessel, the gases were bombarded with electrons, which excited the atoms and made them visible, therefore allowing them to be captured by a fast-acting camera.

The researchers found that real life astrophysical jets behave in their intermediate and far field in a way which is well represented by Newtonian Dynamics.

Metamaterial Reveals Nature of Time and the Impossibility of Time Machines - Technology Review

Metamaterial Reveals Nature of Time and the Impossibility of Time Machines - Technology Review: Metamaterials can help researchers study this problem because it is possible to manipulate them so that space-like dimensions become time-like. Smolyaninov describes how to create a material in which the the x and y directions are space-like while the z-direction is time-like.
The way light moves in this space is exactly analogous to the behaviour of a massive particle in a (2+1) Minkowski spacetime, which is similar to our own universe. So the pattern of light propagation inside this metamaterial is equivalent to the "world lines" of a particle in a Minkowski universe.
Smolyaninov says that a Big Bang event in the metamaterial occurs when the pattern of light rays expands relative to the z-dimension, or in other words, when the world lines expand as a function of time. This establishes a cosmological arrow of time...
Their system is made using specially shaped plastic strips placed on a gold substrate. And the light rays are actually plasmons that propagate across the surface of the metal while being distorted by the plastic strips...

Graphene Could Help Physicists Probe the Higgs Boson's Secrets | Popular Science

Graphene Could Help Physicists Probe the Higgs Boson's Secrets | Popular Science: "When you compress graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, it ripples. This is related to the graphene’s energy potentials. Spontaneous symmetry breaking — fluctuations that dictate what happens next — cause the ripple effect.
Pablo San-Jose, Francisco Guinea, and Jose Gonzalez at Madrid's Institute for Material Science say this is analagous to the symmetry breaking that happened in a blink after the Big Bang."

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."

Wave-generated 'white hole' boosts Hawking radiation theory: research

Wave-generated 'white hole' boosts Hawking radiation theory: research: Placing an airplane wing-shaped obstacle in the path of the flowing water created a region of high-velocity flow which blocked surface waves, generated downstream, from traveling upstream. The obstruction simulated a white hole, the temporal reverse of a black hole.
The shallow surface waves divided into pairs of deep-water waves, analogous to the photon pairs featured in Hawking's theory. Like in black holes, they showed that the analog would also emit a thermal spectrum of radiation.

Physicists create sonic black hole in the lab

Physicists create sonic black hole in the lab: The researchers created the sonic black hole in a Bose-Einstein condensate made of 100,000 rubidium atoms slowed to their lowest quantum state in a magnetic trap. This cold cluster of atoms acts like a single, large quantum mechanical object. In order to transform this condensate into a sonic black hole, the scientists had to find a way to accelerate some of the condensate to supersonic speeds so that the condensate would contain some regions of supersonic flow and some regions of subsonic flow.

The scientists achieved this acceleration by shining a large-diameter laser on the condensate in such a way as to create a steplike potential and a harmonic potential. When the condensate crosses the “step” in the steplike potential, the condensate accelerates to supersonic speeds. The scientists demonstrated that the condensate could accelerate to more than an order of magnitude faster than the speed of sound.

New Scientist TV: How to trap a supernova in a jar

New Scientist TV: How to trap a supernova in a jar: "'The solution is stable until it is triggered' says Stephen Morris of the University of Toronto. 'We do this triggering at the bottom of a small tube that you can see in the bottom of the video. This is something like a fuse. The reaction proceeds as a front up the tube until it enters the much larger main vessel. Then it billows out as a plume. All over the surface of the plume, at a thin front, like a flame front, the reaction is happening. All the fluid motion is generated by the reaction itself.'"

Black Holes In The Bathtub - Science News

Black Holes In The Bathtub - Science News: "The Canadian team with the water-based black hole analog now sees the radiation in the form of water waves. Another team observes photons emitted from a black hole analog in glass. Yet another has created a black hole in ultracold gas that could be probed for the signal in the form of sound. These lab-made emitters of Hawking radiation share one required feature with their astrophysical counterparts — a point of no return, analogous to the black hole’s outer boundary, or event horizon...
These and other analog systems may help solve a lingering problem in Hawking’s original proposal. His model suggested that radiating light could have wavelengths shorter than the Planck length, supposedly the shortest length allowed by quantum mechanics. If light could have such short wavelengths, and thus really high frequencies, one photon could carry more energy than contained in the entire universe — clearly fishy. Hawking had wanted to eliminate this possibility, but he couldn’t make his equations work without it."

Physicists create supernova in a jar (w/ Video)

Physicists create supernova in a jar (w/ Video): "A vertical tube of viscous solution contains stable reactants for the Iodate Arsenous Acid reaction. An indicator makes the solution red. Reaction is triggered at the base of a small tube at the bottom, leading to a growing plume that sheds accelerating vortex rings. No fluid is injected: all the buoyancy is created by the reaction itself. This image shows a pair of successive accelerating vortex rings launched by the plume. The process is analogous to the nuclear deflagration leading to the detonation of a type Ia supernova."

Video - Black hole trip - New Scientist

Video - Black hole trip - New Scientist

New Scientist TV: Darkness visible: Five big black hole puzzles solved

New Scientist TV: Darkness visible: Five big black hole puzzles solved: "How do we know black holes exist? Would you like to know what it would be like to fall into one? Recent simulations and cutting-edge visuals are giving new insight into these strange objects and have helped us answer five big questions about them (see video above).

If you enjoyed this video, you may also like to travel into a black hole. Or how about a black-hole light show? Sounds impossible, so have a look to find out more."

Artificial black holes made with metamaterials

Artificial black holes made with metamaterials: In the Journal of Applied Physics, Huanyang Chen at Soochow University and colleagues have presented a design of an artificial EM black hole designed using five types of composite isotropic materials, layered so that their transverse magnetic modes capture EM waves to which the object is subjected. The artificial EM black hole does not let EM waves escape, analogous to a black hole trapping light. In this case, the trapped EM waves are in the microwave region of the spectrum.