Analog Hawking Effect Enhanced by 4th-Order Dispersion Phase Matching

Hawking radiation [1], the spontaneous emission of radiation by a black hole, is one of the most important discoveries of the XXth century, uniting gravity and thermodynamics, and providing a key insight into the as yet undiscovered theory of quantum gravity. In 1981, Unruh showed that analogs of Hawking radiation could be found in material systems in which a background flow induces an effective horizon for the quasi-particles [2]. The possibility of demonstrating Hawking-like radiation in optics [3] has attracted much attention. The idea is that a short pulse induces, through the Kerr nonlinearity, a refractive index change δ n which gives rise to an effective horizon for a probe wave at another frequency. Despite considerable progress, both theoretical and experimental [4,5], demonstration of Hawking-like radiation in optics remains elusive because of the requirement of an ultra-high peak power and ultra-short background pulse, combined with the expected smallness of the rate of pair production.