Physicists create ‘black hole bomb’ for first time on Earth, validating decades-old theory

> In 1972, physicists William Press and Saul Teukolsky described a theoretical phenomenon called a black hole bomb, in which mirrors enclose, reflect and exponentially amplify waves emanating from a rotating black hole.

> Now, in a new study, physicists from the University of Southampton, the University of Glasgow, and the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies at Italy’s National Research Council experimentally verified the theoretical black hole bomb.

> The ideas underpinning this and the original 1972 paper trace back to foundational work laid by two other physicists. In 1969, British mathematical physicist and Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose proposed a way to extract energy from a rotating black hole, which became known as black hole superradiance. Then, in 1971, Belarussian physicist Yakov Zel’dovich sought to better understand the phenomenon. In the process, he realized that under the right conditions, a rotating object can amplify electromagnetic waves. This phenomenon is known as the **Zel’dovich effect.**

> In their new research, the scientists harnessed the Zel’dovich effect to create their experiment. They took an aluminum cylinder rotated by an electric motor and surrounded it with three layers of metal coils. The coils created and reflected a magnetic field back to the cylinder, acting as a mirror.

> As the team directed a weak magnetic field at the cylinder, they observed that the field the cylinder reflected was even stronger, demonstrating superradiance.

> Next, they removed the coils’ initial weak magnetic field. The circuit, however, generated its own waves, which the spinning cylinder amplified, causing the coils to amass energy. Between the cylinder’s rotational speed and amplified magnetic field, the Zel’dovich effect was in full swing. Zel’dovich had also predicted that a rotating absorber — like the cylinder — would change from absorption to amplification if its surface moves faster than the incoming wave, which the experiment verified.

> “Our work brings this prediction fully into the lab, demonstrating not only amplification but also the transition to instability and spontaneous wave generation,” study co-author Maria Chiara Braidotti

It’s not a “bomb” or a “black hole”. It was a tabletop experiment that reproduced certain principles of a black hole.

This reads to me as if once you get the reaction going you get more energy out of it than you’re putting in. Can someone explain to me what I’m missing?

Really hope they rip the black hole open soon, this year’s been too long

Sounds like the first steps for a warp engine, interesting!

Wormhole weapons do not create peace…

Wormhole weapons create annihilation…