Analytical Theory of Optical Black Hole Analogues

TL;DR

This paper presents an analytical framework for creating optical analogues of black holes, enabling the study of black-hole phenomena like light trajectories and quasinormal modes in laboratory settings.

Contribution

The authors develop an exact formalism linking electromagnetic wave equations in inhomogeneous media to curved spacetime, and extend it to approximate dielectric media for black-hole analogues.

Findings

Exact similarity between wave equations in media and curved spacetime.

Formalism allows analysis of black-hole phenomena like quasinormal modes.

Optical black holes can be used for tabletop experiments.

Abstract

We develop an analytical formalism for studying optical analogues of spherically symmetric black-hole spacetimes. We demonstrate the exact similarity between the electromagnetic wave equations in an inhomogeneous medium in flat spacetime and those in a general-relativistic curved spacetime respectively. The permittivity and the permeability of an inhomogeneous optical medium act as metric components of the analogue spacetime. Manifest properties of black holes like curved light trajectories follow directly from our formalism. Other black-hole phenomena like quasinormal modes can also be studied within this framework. We extend the above formalism and obtain an approximate analogue for the case of purely dielectric media. These optical black holes can be employed to investigate black-hole phenomena with table-top experiments.