Hawking radiation "heard"

The physics arXiv blog (don't get too confused by the officially sounding name!) has pointed out a pretty entertaining condensed matter "experiment":

Carusotto et al. (preprint)

The Italian team has constructed an acoustic counterpart of a gravitational black hole out of a flowing one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate. The velocity creates a sonic barrier, a version of the event horizon.



And this "acoustic black hole" indeed does emit Hawking radiation composed of phonons, as demonstrated by long-range patterns in the density-density correlation function of the gas i.e. by everything strange about the picture above away from the yellow diagonal line.




I haven't told you one more disappointing thing. Even the acoustic "experiment" has so far only been done numerically. Some skillful experimenters will hopefully do better. ;-)