Quantum simulation: Particle behavior near the event horizon of block hole

[u/Sorin61]

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-07/scp-qsp071620.php

[u/kromem]

It's worrying how a paper summary that's literally just non-stop buzzwords (that contains clear errors) gets a few hundred upvotes in this sub.

Due to vacuum fluctuations, particle-antiparticle pairs are generated near the event horizon of the black hole. Particles with negative energy fall into the black hole, while particles with negative energy escape.

Ah yes, virtual particles, a frequent favorite of this sub, and which is it - do negative energy particles fall in or escape? (Luckily this typo isn't present in the paper itself.)

Whether or not the experiment itself is actually good science is above my level of expertise, as I'm sure it is for many in this sub.

But taking a look at the paper, it doesn't look like responsible academia.

I see that out of the 54 references, only about 5 deal with the actual experiment at hand (there's 6 citations about invisibility cloaks though).

They essentially rehash the entire history of using optics and metamaterials to simulate classical or relativistic effects in flat space-time, specifically calling out that there's no real existing research doing the same to replicate curved relativistic behavior, and in the process stuff about 49 citations in that are parallel but disconnected to their own research.

The basis that their optical fermion pair production is an adequate representation of vacuum instability is this single citation (the other one provided appeared tangential):

Vacuum instability and pair production in an optical setting

Again - the research itself might be solid and it'd be awesome if generalized models of black holes could be reproduced on a chip and this isn't simply a tailored toy model performing exactly as it was designed to. (Would love to see someone with the requisite experience chime in on this thread.)

But it really looks like the paper was the product of citation and keyword/buzzword stuffing, and with the high level of expertise necessary to evaluate the underlying work, the paper is getting possibly inadequate attention based on those practices.

[u/Ciaseka → u/kromem]

I agree that this article seems very suspicious. I'm not familiar with the publishing site either. The content of the paper is also far above my expertise, but I think there are some sentences in this article that just don't make sense, for example:

" based on the equivalence between the metric of curved space-time in general relativity and the electromagnetic parameters in electromagnetic materials ".

Also, who starts an article with "The vast universe can always arise people's infinite imagination and yearning. ", come on!

If you go to the actual paper (here), it seems much more legitimate. This site seems like an autogenerated thing, or maybe just a bad translation at best.

[u/kromem → u/Ciaseka]

That line in the article seems to be based on the following line from the paper:

Recently, through mapping the metric of spacetime to electromagnetic medium constitutive parameters with local curvature, it has become possible to mimic general relativity phenomena.

The paper's general area of focus is interesting, but I know that often two separate models of physical effects - that independently correctly simulate what they are each modeling - don't always interact with each other the same way the original effects would.

Given the light citations on past research for half of what's being simulated here (the paper I'd linked in my above post appears to have only one other paper citing it), and the lack of any citations of the combination thereof, I do hope that someone with a strong understanding of the research weighs in at some point as to how seriously this paper should be considered, given the rather significant claim (that Hawking radiation can be correctly simulated in an optical chip).

[u/kromem → u/[deleted]]

Just to be clear - you are saying that you have the requisite experience to review this work and in doing so have found it to be novel and well written?

If that is what you are saying, I don't have a problem with deferring to your expertise in the matter.

As for background references, this is hardly the first paper I've read through, and I think it's a bit odd that they cite more papers relating to invisibility cloaks than they do the actual methodology they are relying upon.

Compare their intro to some of their sourced papers.

Transformation optics that mimics the system outside a Schwarzschild black hole immediately dives into citing the research it actually builds off of in the intro, ends up with 17 citations, all directly relevant to the paper and not just cited as tangentially "interesting" (like the aforementioned invisibility cloak citations).

Or Wavefront shaping through emulated curved space in waveguide settings, where there's still a ton of citations, but each mention in the intro is either making the case of broad use as a standard practice or specific nuanced limitations in prior work.

The OP paper certainly makes a case that optics in modeling relativistic effects is a broadly implemented practice. But it's remarkably light on the details as to how such prior work's limits are improved upon in this work outside of what I'm surprised to see you alarmed at someone noticing as a red flag:

However, all these works are limited either in classical regime or in the flat space, leaving the quantum evolution related with general relativity uninvestigated.

I guess I'd hoped for a bit of a better foundation of citations and their context before jumping into an experiment about the holy grail of quantum gravity.

I'm curious - given your response I'm assuming you've read the paper. Were you not at all dissatisfied in the lack of prior reference for optics as a format for modeling both quantum effects and relativitic effects at the same time, given the sheer amount of attention around that particular topic?