Analogue Black Holes in Reactive Molecules

Abstract

We show that reactive molecules with a unit probability of reaction naturally provide a simulator of some intriguing black hole physics. The unit reaction at the short distance acts as an event horizon and delivers a one-way traffic for matter waves passing through the potential barrier when two molecules interact by high partial-wave scatterings or dipole-dipole interactions. In particular, the scattering rate as a function of the incident energy exhibits a thermal-like distribution near the maximum of the interaction energy in the same manner as a scalar field scatters with the potential barrier outside the event horizon of a black hole. Such a thermal-like scattering can be extracted from the temperature-dependent two-body loss rate measured in experiments on KRb and other molecules.