  Belgiorno et al have reported on experiments aiming at the detection of (the
analogue of) Hawking radiation using laser filaments [F. Belgiorno et al, Phys.
Rev. Lett. 105, 203901 (2010)]. They sent intense focused Bessel pulses into a
non-linear dielectric medium in order to change its refractive index via the
Kerr effect and saw creation of photons orthogonal to the direction of travel
of the pluses. Since the refractive index change in the pulse generated a
"phase horizon" (where the phase velocity of these photons equals the pulse
speed), they concluded that they observed the analogue of Hawking radiation. We
study this scenario in a model with a phase horizon and a phase velocity very
similar to that of their experiment and find that the effective metric does not
quite correspond to a black hole. The photons created in this model are not due
to the analogue of black hole evaporation but have more similarities to
cosmological particle creation. Nevertheless, even this effect cannot explain
the observations -- unless the pulse has significant small scale structure in
both the longitudinal and transverse dimensions.
