More than 2,000 miles from Cambridge, in the Israeli city of Haifa, research is under way that could allow Stephen Hawking to prove his most mind-boggling theory.

In a laboratory at the Technion, physics professor Jeff Steinhauer has simulated a black hole and, as a result, claims to have observed the elusive "Hawking radiation" which the renowned Cambridge-based professor first spoke about 42 years ago.

Dr Hawking amazed fellow scientists by challenging the accepted wisdom that nothing could escape from a black hole. He argued that they emit tiny particles, allowing energy to escape. Black holes, he suggested, could eventually evaporate.

He has struggled to prove the theory as it deals with movements so tiny that their existence cannot be confirmed or denied from Earth.

But Dr Steinhauer may have managed the next best thing to monitoring black holes in space. He cooled helium to almost absolute zero and spun it around at speed to form a sound barrier, thereby mimicking the edge of a black hole, across which conventional wisdom states that nothing can escape. But he reported that phonons - tiny packets of energy that form sound waves, - did escape.

"This confirms Hawking's prediction regarding black hole thermodynamics," he wrote.

Silke Weinfurtner, a research fellow in Nottingham University's School of Mathematical Sciences, said: "This is groundbreaking - a huge leap forward, given the old results.

"Analogue systems cannot prove if a black hole is evaporating, but the effect is universal and physics has the ability to reappear in a variety of systems.

"People have started to investigate whether they can come to the same result as Jeff. The first studies are indicating that this might be possible.

"New details might come out, and that doesn't mean this first experiment was wrong, but more experiments are necessary. He always assumes that there is no other quantum noise in the system, and that's not clear."

The research is currently undergoing peer review at a prominent journal. If it passes this process, it is likely to become accepted by the scientific community and could be seen as the strongest support yet for "Hawking radiation". There is speculation that it could propel Dr Hawking to a Nobel prize.

Ram Brustein, head of the physics department at Ben Gurion University, said that it was too early for him to comment on the Technion research, but stressed that in his opinion it did "not create a real black hole but a boundary for some signals". As such, he said that success in the Technion experiments would not instantly confirm Dr Hawking's theory.