Hawking Radiation from an Acoustic Black Hole on an Ion Ring

TL;DR

This paper proposes simulating acoustic black holes using ions on a ring with inhomogeneous velocity profiles to observe Hawking radiation, offering a new experimental approach in quantum analog gravity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ion ring setup to simulate acoustic black holes and discusses how to detect Hawking radiation in this discrete, nonlinear dispersion system.

Findings

Regions where ion velocity exceeds phonon group velocity can trap phonons.

Hawking radiation can be theoretically observed in this ion ring setup.

A detection scheme for Hawking radiation in the proposed system is outlined.

Abstract

In this article we propose to simulate acoustic black holes with ions in rings. If the ions are rotating with a stationary and inhomogeneous velocity profile, regions can appear where the ion velocity exceeds the group velocity of the phonons. In these regions phonons are trapped like light in black holes, even though we have a discrete field theory and a nonlinear dispersion relation. We study the appearance of Hawking radiation in this setup and propose a scheme to detect it.