Researchers say the experiment is a step towards creating systems with ‘properties analogous to black holes’. The scientists tested a theory devised by the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. — SCMP
A Chinese-led team of scientists say they have simulated the physics of black holes using quantum computing.
The researchers said the experiments on Hawking radiation opened up a new path for simulating the quantum effects of black holes with superconducting quantum chips and marked “a step in the direction of creating quantum systems with properties analogous to those of black holes”.
A black hole is a region in space where gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape.
When a particle falls into a black hole horizon and the horizon prevents the particle from turning back, it becomes impossible to escape.
But when quantum effects are taken into account, the particle inside the black hole will gradually escape to the outside, leading to Hawking radiation, according to the team.
The theory proposed by the British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in 1974 refers to radiation, energy that travels in the form of waves or particles, theoretically emitted from just outside the event horizon – or boundary – of a black hole.
Through Hawking radiation, black holes lose energy and will eventually evaporate.
“This new constructed analogue black hole then facilitates further investigations of other related problems of the black hole,” the researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianjin University, the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences and the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research in Japan said in their findings published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications this month.
While it was difficult to directly observe the quantum effect of a real black hole in astrophysics, it was also challenging to test them through experiments because these effects were very weak, the team said.
Over the past years, scientists have tested the theory in experiments using shallow water waves, Bose-Einstein condensates – a state of matter where all the constituent particles are at their lowest energy level – and optical metamaterials and light.
In the latest study to observe analogue Hawking radiation, the team developed a superconducting processor consisting of a chain of 10 qubits with interaction couplings controlled by nine tunable couplers.
“The results show that there is always a certain probability that the quasiparticle inside the analogue black hole will radiate through the event horizon, and its radiation probability satisfies the property of Hawking radiation,” the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in an article on research progress.
The team said the behaviour of stimulated Hawking radiation was verified by the measurement of all of the qubits outside the horizon.
“Our results would stimulate more interest to explore the related features of black holes using the programmable superconducting processor with tunable couplers,” the team wrote. – South China Morning Post
