Physicists at the University of Southampton achieved a milestone by successfully creating a "black hole bomb" in a laboratory setting. Led by Marion Cromb, the research team designed a harmless proof of concept that simulates the extreme conditions around a rotating black hole, according to Live Science.
The black hole bomb is a phenomenon that was first proposed in the 1970s by physicists Roger Penrose and Yakov Zel'dovich. The concept involves boosting energy with a black hole and trapping it with mirrors until an explosive release occurs—a theory further described by William Press and Saul Teukolsky in 1972.
In their new research, the scientists harnessed the Zel'dovich effect to create their experiment. They used a rotating aluminum cylinder surrounded by three layers of metal coils that generated magnetic fields. This setup effectively created a mini black hole bomb in the laboratory.
The experiment was detailed in a draft paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on March 31 and is awaiting peer review. Co-author and University of Southampton physics professor Hendrik Ulbricht and his colleagues investigated the Zel'dovich effect using their prototype. The team demonstrated how energy can be extracted and amplified through a positive feedback cycle.
During the experiment, they discovered that when the cylinder rotated faster than the magnetic field, an increase in the energy of the field was observed, amplifying the magnetic signal. "Our work brings this prediction fully into the lab, demonstrating not only amplification but also the transition to instability and spontaneous wave generation," said Maria Chiara Braidotti, a researcher involved in the study, according to Live Science.
The coils around the system acted as reflectors, producing a feedback loop that trapped and amplified the energy—similar to the mirrors in the original black hole bomb concept. This led to an enhanced magnetic signal, effectively simulating the explosive energy release theorized by Zel'dovich.
Although the laboratory model of the black hole bomb is harmless, it offers physicists a rare opportunity to study superradiance in detail. The experiment could help scientists better understand how real black holes give energy to particles around them and could also aid in testing theories involving exotic fields, including those thought to be related to dark matter.
The phenomenon of energy extraction from rotating black holes was first theorized by Roger Penrose in 1969, who noted that a particle getting close to a spinning black hole gained energy. Yakov Zel'dovich expanded on this idea in 1971, proposing a spinning system to investigate whether the rotational energy of a black hole could be extracted. He suggested that energy could accumulate in a positive feedback manner if mirrors were placed around a rotating cylindrical structure.
"This system directly meets the conditions predicted by Zel'dovich in 1971 and developed into the black hole bomb by Press and Teukolsky," the researchers stated in their paper. The experiment simulates the energy increase in the ergosphere around black holes, where objects can be accelerated to speeds greater than the speed of light, helping to study how black holes drag and accelerate the fabric of space-time around them.
"Although direct observation of black holes is not possible, it may be possible to learn more about the nature of black holes, one of the universe's most extreme structures, through such experimental analogs," the team noted.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.