This week, the scientific journal Nature published the article titled Rotating curved spacetime signatures from a giant quantum vortex, of which I am the lead author. The article is the result of two years of hard work at the University of Nottingham, where, together with my colleagues and PhD students, I have set up a low-temperature experiment in which we managed to stabilise the most powerful vortices (or quantum tornadoes) in superfluid helium so far. We also showed that small ripples on the surface of liquid helium behave in the vicinity of these tornadoes in the same way as if they were moving in the curved spacetime of a rotating black hole.

This research opens up new possibilities for experimentally studying curved spacetimes and, I hope, in the near future, the properties of black holes themselves, without having to create or directly observe an actual black hole.