On the analogy between black holes and bathtub vortices

Abstract

Analogical thinking is a valuable tool in theoretical physics, since it allows us to take the understanding we have developed in one system and apply it to another. In this thesis, we study the analogy between two seemingly unlikely systems: rotating black holes, elusive cosmic entities that push our theoretical understanding of modern physics to its limits, and bathtub vortices, an occurrence so common that they can be observed on a day-to-day basis in almost any household. Despite the clear difference between these two systems, we argue that lessons from each can be used to learn something about the other. We investigate the equivalence between surface wave propagation in shallow water and the propagation of a massless scalar field on an effective spacetime, focussing in particular on the rotating black hole geometry sourced by a rotating draining vortex flow. Using this analogy, we verify for the first time that three effects predicted to occur around rotating black holes also occur in a laboratory experiment. These are superradiance, an energy enhancement process whereby waves extract rotational energy from the system, quasi-normal ringing, describing the relaxation of the system toward equilibrium, and the backreaction, which mediates the exchange of energy between fluctuations and the background they experience.