Black hole mirages, Tobias Meng (TU Dresden)

Wednesday 9 Nov 2022, 16:15 → 17:45 Europe/Berlin

Abbeanum/Ground floor-HS 2 - Hörsaal 2 (TPI, FSU Jena)

Graphene, a quantum material consisting of a sheet of carbon atoms, showcased that solids can exhibit analogues of relativistic physics. In this talk, I will review the more recently discussed analogies between Weyl semimetals (a class of materials in three spatial dimensions) and relativistic physics.

A particular focus will be on Weyl semimetals with spatially inhomogeneous material properties, which can in principle be induced by inhomogeneous strain patterns. These systems exhibit analogies to spacetimes with black holes. On the one hand, these analogies allow for a physically transparent description of transport properties, which in turn paves the way towards applications such as electron lenses. On the other hand, the fact that solids are not the universe implies that the analogies do not hold in all regimes. If we look hard enough, analogue black holes fade away like a mirage, thereby revealing physics „beyond“ gravity analogies.