IMAGINE being able to peek inside a black hole and even perform experiments there. It may not be as far-fetched as it sounds, thanks to a team which claims to have simulated a black hole’s event horizon in the lab.
Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews, UK, and his colleagues accomplished the feat by firing lasers down an optical fibre, exploiting the fact that different wavelengths of light move at different speeds within an optical fibre.
They first shot a relatively slow-moving laser pulse through the fibre, and then sent a faster “probe wave” chasing after it. The…
