Analogues of the Hawking effect are interesting, not least because they are in principle easier to realize than the genuine phenomenon, which needs a black hole. Ralf Schützhold of the Technische Universität, Dresden, and William G Unruh of the University of Victoria have recently suggested what may be the best candidate yet.
Inverting the fact that light propagating in a curved space-time can be thought of as propagating in a non-uniform index of refraction, they show that the propagation of electromagnetic waves of suitable wavelengths in an appropriate waveguide can be described in terms of an effectively curved space-time. The analogue of Hawking radiation should be just about measurable in microwaves with today's technology and suggests a novel approach to studying this exotic effect in a model system. Among the insights that might be gained is some idea of what happens in the trans-Planckian regime.
Further reading
Ralf Schützhold and William G Unruh 2005 Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 031301.