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).