Dr Sam Patrick is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics, King’s College London. He completed his PhD in 2019 at the University of Nottingham, working on experimental and theoretical aspects of rotating black hole analogues using water waves. He then worked as a postdoc at the University of British Columbia with Bill Unruh. He started as a postdoc at King’s in 2022 under the supervision of Ruth Gregory. He is currently developing theoretical models of rotating and non-rotating black hole analogues in superfluid helium and nonlinear optics to inform ongoing gravity simulator experiments in Nottingham and St Andrews. He was recently awarded a Stephen Hawking Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate wave-vortex interactions in superfluid helium and quantum black hole simulators.

Research interests 

Sam’s research sits at the interface of gravity and condensed matter - particularly classical/quantum fluids and optical systems. General themes in his research are:

• Analogue black holes  
• Classical and quantum vortices  
• Black hole ringdown and superradiance  
• Black holes in de Sitter space  
• Waves in dispersive media  
• Superfluid helium  
• Nonlinear optics  

Further information 

• Google scholar
• Inspire HEP