Optical black hole
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An optical black hole is a type of artificially produced phenomenon in which light is slowed significantly by passing it through an ultra-low temperature Bose-Einstein condensate that is itself spinning faster than the local speed of light within to create a vortex capable of trapping the light behind an event horizon just as would an astronomical black hole.
Light in an optical black hole would behave analogously to matter in a real black hole permitting laboratory study of Hawking radiation, which is nearly impossible to observe in nature because of obscuring cosmic background microwave radiation and could also help in developing a quantum theory of gravity.
