Scientists Build First-Ever 'Black Hole Bomb' Analog

upstart writes:

Black hole analogs are one of our best tools for understanding how they work:

Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb', a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s.

If there's one thing black holes are known for, it's their insatiable, inescapable gravity. Stuff goes into a black hole. You're not really going to get much out.

From beyond the event horizon, this is, as far as we know, true. But from the space around a black hole, you might be able to get something. As Roger Penrose proposed in 1971, the powerful rotational energy of a spinning black hole could be used to amplify the energy of nearby particles.

Then, physicist Yakov Zel'Dovich figured out that you didn't need a black hole to see this phenomenon in action. An axially symmetrical body rotating in a resonance chamber, he figured, could produce the same energy transfer and amplification, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Later work by other physicists found that, if you enclose the entire apparatus in a mirror, a positive feedback loop is generated, amplifying the energy until it explodes from the system.

This concept was named the black hole bomb, and a team of physicists led by Marion Cromb of the University of Southampton in the UK now claim to have brought it to life. A paper describing their experiment has been uploaded to preprint server arXiv.

It doesn't, just to set your mind at ease, pose any danger. It consists of a rotating aluminum cylinder, placed inside layers of coils that generate magnetic fields that rotate around it, at controllable speeds.

[...] We can't experimentally replicate this gravitational effect; what the team's experiment does is simulate it, using magnetic fields as a proxy for the particles, with the coils around the system acting as the reflector to produce the feedback loop.

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