Analogue Black Holes in Reactive Molecules

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that reactive molecules can simulate black hole physics by exhibiting event horizon-like behavior and thermal scattering distributions, providing a new platform for studying black hole analogues.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analogy between reactive molecular interactions and black hole event horizons, linking molecular scattering rates to black hole physics.

Findings

Reactive molecules act as black hole simulators with event horizon-like behavior.

Scattering rates show thermal-like distribution near maximum interaction energy.

Experimental measurements on KRb molecules support the theoretical analogy.

Abstract

We show that reactive molecules with a unit probability of reaction naturally provide a simulator of some intriguing black hole physics. The unit reaction at the short distance acts as an event horizon and delivers a one-way traffic for matter waves passing through the potential barrier when two molecules interact by high partial-wave scatterings or dipole-dipole interactions. In particular, the scattering rate as a function of the incident energy exhibits a thermal-like distribution near the maximum of the interaction energy in the same manner as a scalar field scatters with the potential barrier outside the event horizon of a black hole. Such a thermal-like scattering can be extracted from the temperature-dependent two-body loss rate measured in experiments on KRb and other molecules.