Nobel physicist designing ‘toy’ black hole for research

Eric Cornell, one of three winners of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physics, said that he was in the process of developing a ‘toy’  black hole. This would help in a better understanding of theories around the space body. In 1915, Albert Einstein first published the general theory of relativity. Among the astrophysical implications of that theory is the presence, in space, of regions that distort space and time, allowing nothing, not even light, to escape. The black hole was posited as the end-state for massive stars.

The Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter that was first proposed by Satyendranath Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924, became a reality when Eric Cornell and his colleague Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado in the US produced this state of matter. It was for this effort that the two scientists, along with Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received the Nobel in Physics.

Speaking of the project to create a black hole, Cornell said, “It will be like a miniature model of the black hole. It will help in the study of the big bang phenomenon and the history of the earth. A student and I are part of the project.” Cornell was addressing an audience at the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology.

The artificial black hole that the scientist is in the process of developing will trap sound, instead of light. This will aid in research of the theory of Hawkins radiation, first proposed by Stephen Hawkins in 1974. No empirical evidence for this exists, and the theory throws light on the process by which the black hole evaporates over time. The process proposed by Hawkins shows that the radiation would reduce the mass of the black hole. The Hawking radiation theory suggested that a black hole is not black, but glows, though the light is too weak to be seen.

The ‘toy’ black body is still in a preliminary stage, and is being developed at Cornell’s lab in the University of Colorado. “As of now, it has no commercial application. We are building it to understand how objects behave when they come closer to the black hole,” Cornell said.