MG12 - Talk detail
 

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Abstract

Rotating acoustic black holes and superradiance in a nonlinear optical cavity

Exploiting the relation between nonlinear optics and fluid dynamics we show that rotating acoustic black holes can be created in a self-defocusing optical cavity. Light-matter interaction in self-defocusing media can be indeed described in terms of a two-dimensional ``photon-fluid", where the optical intensity corresponds to fluid density and the gradient of the phase to the fluid velocity. On this fluid, linear excitations (sound-waves) experience an effective Lorentzian curved spacetime determined by the physical properties of the flow. Since in an optical cavity configuration the background flow is "pinned" by the driving field, the injection of a suitable optical vortex beam allows the generation of acoustic ergoregions and event horizons. An experiment to simulate the Kerr geometry and observe superradiance is proposed.

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