Holographic image of a black hole proposed in a graphene flake

Physicists have theoretically shown that, by applying a magnetic field to a small, irregularly shaped graphene flake, the flake becomes a quantum hologram of a black hole. This means that the graphene flake recreates the spatial structure and characteristic properties of a black hole, but in a much smaller, lower-dimensional system.

The physicists,Anffany Chen and coauthors from institutions in Canada, Israel, the UK, and the US, have published a paper on the graphene quantum hologram in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

"We show that a rather ubiquitous and well-studied material—graphene—can behave innovel and exciting ways under certain conditions," coauthor Marcel Franz, a physics professor at the University of British Columbia, told Phys.org. "Specifically, the electrons in a nanoscale-sized flake of graphene with an irregular boundary and in an applied magnetic field could realize the so-called Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model."

As the physicists explain, the SYK model illustrates a type of "holographic duality," in which a higher-dimensional system (here, a black hole in (1+1)-dimensional spacetime) can be represented by a lower-dimensional system (in this case, the electrons in graphene, which occupy a (0+1)-dimensional spacetime).

The type of holographic duality illustrated by the SYK model is particularly interesting because it exhibits some of the signature properties of black holes, such as non-zero residual entropy and quantum chaos propagation. It may also help answer fundamental questions about the connection between quantum mechanics and gravity.