Date: Tuesday 17th July

Who: Bill Unruh, University of British Columbia

Seminar type: Research Seminar

Time: 1pm

Where: Physics Annexe, CONFFERENCE ROOM, Room 407

Abstract:

In this talk Bill Unruh draws analogies between black holes (singularities in space-time) and a fluid-mechanical model of “dumb holes.”
It is shown that the horizon of a black-hole is analogous to the point in a fluid system where the background fluid flow exceeds the velocity of sound (and thus sound waves travelling against the flow cannot propagate across this boundary). Unruh comments on the possibility of performing experiments on fluid systems to observe the acoustic analogue of Hawking radiation. This would require measuring power on the order of ~10^-16 Watts in liquid helium, or ~10^-33 Watts in a Bose-Einstein condensate. There is some hope that these miniscule powers might be accessible to experimenters.

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