Observation of noise correlated by the Hawking effect in a water tank

Abstract

We measured the power spectrum and two-point correlation function for the randomly fluctuating free surface on the downstream side of a stationary flow with a maximum Froude number $F_{\rm max} \approx 0.85$ reached above a localised obstacle. On such a flow the scattering of incident long wavelength modes is analogous to that responsible for black hole radiation (the Hawking effect). Our measurements of the noise show a clear correlation between pairs of modes of opposite energies. We also measure the scattering coefficients by applying the same analysis of correlations to waves produced by a wave maker.