Hawking radiation in optics and beyond

Abstract

Hawking radiation was originally proposed in astrophysics, but it has been generalized and extended to other physical systems receiving the name of analogue Hawking radiation. In the last two decades, several attempts have been made to measure it in a laboratory, and one of the most successful systems is in optics. Light interacting in a dielectric material causes an analogue Hawking effect, in fact, its stimulated version has already been detected and the search for the spontaneous signal is currently ongoing. We briefly review the general derivation of Hawking radiation, then we focus on the optical analogue and present some novel numerical results. Finally, we call for a generalization of the term Hawking radiation. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The next generation of analogue gravity experiments’.