LAUSR

This Letter introduces a synergistic combination of analytical and numerical methods to study the Hawking effect in optical systems containing the analog of a white-black hole pair. Our analytical treatment, based on techniques from Gaussian quantum information, provides a simple and efficient model to describe all aspects of the out-state, including the entanglement between any bipartition. We complement the study with a numerical analysis and apply our tools to investigate the influence that ambient thermal noise and detector inefficiencies have on the out-state. We find that aspects of the Hawking effect that are of quantum origin, i.e., quantum entanglement, are extremely fragile to the influence of inefficiencies and noise. We propose a protocol to amplify and observe these quantum aspects, based on seeding the process with a single-mode squeezed input, opening the door to new possibilities for experimental verification of the Hawking effect.