Journal
COMMUNICATIONS PHYSICS
Volume 3, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s42005-020-0384-5
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Funding
- Tushar Shah and Sara Zion Fellowship
- DOE [DE-SC00012567]
- MIT Open Access Article Publication Subvention Fund
- MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center
- MIT Center for Theoretical Physics
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Optical analogues of gravitational systems probe general relativity in the laboratory, yet exactly mimicking black holes remains challenging. The authors model light propagating in optical analogues of equatorial Kerr-Newman black holes with regular materials, with clear advantages to realization. Optical analogues to black holes allow the investigation of general relativity in a laboratory setting. Previous works have considered analogues to Schwarzschild black holes in an isotropic coordinate system; the major drawback is that required material properties diverge at the horizon. We present the dielectric permittivity and permeability tensors that exactly reproduce the equatorial Kerr-Newman metric, as well as the gradient-index material that reproduces equatorial Kerr-Newman null geodesics. Importantly, the radial profile of the scalar refractive index is finite along all trajectories except at the point of rotation reversal for counter-rotating geodesics. Construction of these analogues is feasible with available ordinary materials. A finite-difference frequency-domain solver of Maxwell's equations is used to simulate light trajectories around a variety of Kerr-Newman black holes. For reasonably sized experimental systems, ray tracing confirms that null geodesics can be well-approximated in the lab, even when allowing for imperfect construction and experimental error.
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