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Acoustic black holes

Matt Visser
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Abstract

Acoustic propagation in a moving fluid provides a conceptually clean and powerful analogy for understanding black hole physics. As a teaching tool, the analogy is useful for introducing students to both General Relativity and fluid mechanics. As a research tool, the analogy helps clarify what aspects of the physics are kinematics and what aspects are dynamics. In particular, Hawking radiation is a purely kinematical effect, whereas black hole entropy is intrinsically dynamical. Finally, I discuss the fact that with present technology acoustic Hawking radiation is almost experimentally testable.

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Matt Visser. 1999-01-16. Acoustic black holes. https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9901047

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