Narrow Results

We study the phonon tunneling through the horizon of an acoustic black hole by solving the Hamilton–Jacobi equation. We also make use of the closed-path integral to calculate the tunneling probability, and an improved way to determine the temporal contribution is used. Both the results from the two methods agree with Hawking's initial analysis.

Coherent light propagating in a bulk Kerr nonlinear defocusing medium obeys nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation, which is similar to the Gross–Pitaevskii equation for Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs). An equivalent hydrodynamic approach allows one to consider propagation of light as a flow of an equivalent “luminous fluid.” An analog optical event horizon can be formed when the flow velocity of this fluid equals the local sound velocity, determined by the nonlinear term in the NLS equation. The analog event horizon is characterized by a finite width, also determined by the nonlinearity length, or by the healing length in Bose–Einstein condensates. The various eigenmodes of fluctuations are found in the immediate vicinity of the event horizon and the scattering matrix due to the finite width horizon is calculated to be within the leading order corrections in the nonlinearity length. The Hawking radiation is found to be enhanced with respect to that of a Planck’s black body spectrum and is characterized by the emissivity greater than one. A procedure of paraxial quantization of the fluctuation field is discussed and its connection to the conventional quantization of the electromagnetic field is demonstrated. Quantum fluctuations of the electric field energy and those of its flow are calculated.

We theoretically studied the sonic horizon formation problem for coupled one-dimensional Bose–Einstein condensate trapped in an external elongated harmonic potential. Based on the coupled (1+1)-dimensional Gross–Pitaevskii equation and F-expansion method under Thomas–Fermi formulation, we derived analytical wave functions of a two-component system, from which the sonic horizon’s occurrence criteria and location were derived and graphically demonstrated. The theoretically derived results of sonic horizon formation agree pretty well with that from the numerically calculated values.

Based on the Gross–Pitaevskii equation model that incorporates higher-order nonlinear interaction, we studied sonic black hole and sonic horizon formation involved in nonlinear dynamical evolution for Bose–Einstein condensates with higher-order nonlinear interaction. On the basis of the modified variational method and the scenario where the system starts dynamic evolution from ground state, we derived the typical system distribution width function, which is analytically formulated as periodic oscillation solution and monotonically damped variational oscillation solution under different parametric settings. We also calculated the criteria formula for sonic black hole horizon formation with regard to the two evolution modes: oscillation mode and monotonically decay mode, pictorially demonstrating the time interval of sonic horizon appearance. The theoretical results obtained here can be used to guide relevant experimental studies of sonic horizon and sonic black hole formation for Bose–Einstein condensates incorporating the higher-order nonlinear interaction effects.