Scientists from Princeton have created a unique microchip capable of simulating the structure of space-time inside a black hole or miniature two-dimensional universe. The first results of experiments with this device were presented in the journal Nature.
“Ordinary computers, in principle, cannot calculate the behavior of complex quantum materials and systems. We tried to create a device that will make nature do these calculations for us. This chip will allow us to think about how we can 'build' quantum mechanics into curved spaces,”says Alicia Kollar from Princeton University (USA). Regular and supermassive black holes have such a strong gravity that it cannot be overcome without exceeding the speed of light. No objects or radiation can escape from beyond the impact of the black hole, which is called the "event horizon". What happens beyond the event horizon remains a mystery and a subject of controversy among physicists. Most scientists believe that we, in principle, cannot look inside a black hole and study its structure,since this will lead to extremely unpleasant consequences - in this case, we will not be able to "reconcile" Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Nevertheless, black holes exist, and their behavior and existence must be explained somehow. Relatively recently, physicists began to believe that black holes are actually not three-dimensional, but two-dimensional objects, a kind of cosmic "holograms".
This theory and the equations describing it were put forward in the late 1990s by two well-known cosmologists - Juan Maldasena from Princeton University and Gerard 't Hooft from Utrecht University.
They suggested that space-time inside a black hole is not "flat" in nature, as in the surrounding Universe, but has a constant negative curvature. Simply put, it is similar in geometry to a saddle or an inverted sphere and is designed so that its "edge", the inner edge of the event horizon, is equally infinitely distant from any point inside the black hole.
As Collard notes, testing this theory, as well as other scientific ideas that use Lobachevsky space, was complicated by the fact that the behavior of particles and other objects in such a space was almost impossible to calculate.
Scientists from Princeton have solved this problem by creating the first kind of "black hole simulator", using miniature microwave generators, as well as a special chip into which many pieces of superconductors were inserted.
They play the role of not wires, but waveguides, along which particles of light generated by microwave sources can move and indirectly interact with each other. These interactions will either slow down the movement of other particles, or influence them in other ways.
Collard and her colleagues found that if these waveguides are laid out in a grid similar in structure to a honeycomb, made up of five, six, or octagons, then the photons inside them begin to behave as if they were inside a black hole or other space with negative curvature.
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Such chips, as scientists note, will help not only reveal many secrets of black holes, including how similar objects evaporate under the influence of Hawking's study, but also accelerate many quantum calculations in chemistry, physics and other fields of science.
For this, as the physicist admits, it is necessary to change the operation of the current version of the chip so that the photons begin to interact more actively with each other. This is a completely solvable problem that the researchers from Princeton are planning to solve in the very near future.
