  Accelerating relativistic mirror has long been recognized as a viable setting
where the physics mimics that of black hole Hawking radiation. In 2017, Chen
and Mourou proposed a novel method to realize such a system by traversing an
ultra-intense laser through a plasma target with a decreasing density. An
international AnaBHEL (Analog Black Hole Evaporation via Lasers) Collaboration
has been formed with the objectives of observing the analog Hawking radiation
and shedding light on the information loss paradox. To reach these goals, we
plan to first verify the dynamics of the flying plasma mirror and to
characterize the correspondence between the plasma density gradient and the
trajectory of the accelerating plasma mirror. We will then attempt to detect
the analog Hawking radiation photons and measure the entanglement between the
Hawking photons and their "partner particles". In this paper, we describe our
vision and strategy of AnaBHEL using the Apollon laser as a reference, and we
report on the progress of our R&D of the key components in this experiment,
including the supersonic gas jet with a graded density profile, and the
superconducting nanowire single-photon Hawking detector. In parallel to these
hardware efforts, we performed computer simulations to estimate the potential
backgrounds, and derive analytic expressions for modifications to the blackbody
spectrum of Hawking radiation for a perfectly reflecting, point mirror, due to
the semit-ransparency and finite-size effects specific to flying plasma
mirrors. Based on this more realistic radiation spectrum, we estimate the
Hawking photon yield to guide the design of the AnaBHEL experiment, which
appears to be achievable.
