As is well known, in 1974 Stephen Hawking announced that quantum mechanically black holes should emit
radiation with a spectrum approximately that of a black body [270, 271]. We shall not re-derive the
existence of Hawking radiation from scratch, but will instead assume a certain familiarity with at least the
basics of the phenomenon. (See, for instance, [95] or [309].) The collapse of a distribution of matter will end
up forming an evaporating black hole emitting particles from its horizon toward future null infinity.
Hawking radiation is a quantum-field-in-curved-space effect: The existence of radiation emission is a
kinematic effect that does not rely on Einstein’s equations. Therefore, one can aim to reproduce it in a
condensed-matter system. Within standard field theory, a minimal requirement for having Hawking
radiation is the existence in the background configuration of an apparent horizon [629]. So, in principle, to
be able to reproduce Hawking radiation in a laboratory one would have to fulfill at least two
requirements:
This is a straightforward and quite naive translation of the standard Hawking effect derivation to the condensed matter realm. However, in reality, this translation process has to take into account additional issues that, as we are trying to convey, instead of problems, are where the interesting physics lies.
Because of its importance, let us now review what we know about the effects of high-energy dispersion relations on the Hawking process.
We saw in the introduction to this section that the trans-Planckian problem of Hawking radiation was one of the strongest motivations for the modern research into analogue models of gravity. In fact, it was soon realised that such models could provide a physical framework within which a viable solution of the problem could be found. Let us explain why and how.
As we have said, the requirement of a reservoir of ultra-high frequency modes near the horizon seems to
indicate a possible (and worrisome) sensitivity of the black-hole radiation to the microscopic
structure of spacetime. Actually, by assuming exact Lorentz invariance, one could, in principle,
always locally transform the problematic ultra-high frequency modes to low energy ones via some
appropriate Lorentz transformation [307]. However there are (at least) two problems in doing
so:
It was this type of reasoning that led in the nineties to a careful reconsideration of the crucial
ingredients required for the derivation of Hawking radiation [307, 308
, 608
]. In particular investigators
explored the possibility that spacetime microphysics could provide a short-distance, Lorentz-breaking cutoff,
but at the same time leave Hawking’s results unaffected at energy scales well below that set by the
cutoff.
Of course, ideas about a possible cutoff imposed by the discreteness of spacetime at the Planck scale had
already been discussed in the literature well before Unruh’s seminal paper [607]. However, such ideas were
running into serious difficulties given that a naive short-distance cutoff posed on the available modes of a
free field theory results in a complete removal of the evaporation process (see, e.g., Jacobson’s article [307
]
and references therein, and the comments in [278
, 279
, 280
]). Indeed there are alternative ways through
which the effect of the short-scale physics could be taken into account, and analogue models provide a
physical framework where these ideas could be put to the test. In fact, analogue models provide explicit
examples of emergent spacetime symmetries; they can be used to simulate black-hole backgrounds; they
may be endowed with quantizable perturbations and, in most of the cases, they have a well-known
microscopic structure. Given that Hawking radiation can be, at least in principle, simulated
in such systems, one might ask how and if the trans-Planckian problem is resolved in these
cases.
In general, the best one can do is to expand around
, obtaining an infinite power
series (of which it will be safe to retain only the lowest-order terms), although in some special models (like
BEC) the series is automatically finite due to intrinsic properties of the system. (In any case, one can see
that most of the analogue models so far considered lead to modifications of the form
or
.) Depending on the sign in front of the modification, the group velocity at high
energy can be larger (
) or smaller (
) than the low energy speed of light
. These
cases are usually referred to in the literature as “superluminal” and “subluminal” dispersion
relations.
Most of the work on the trans-Planckian problem in the 1990s focused on studying
the effect on Hawking radiation due to such modifications of the dispersion relations at
high energies in the case of acoustic analogues [307, 308
, 608
, 148
], and the question of
whether such phenomenology could be applied to the case of real black holes (see e.g.,
[94
, 310, 148
, 490
]).22
In all the aforementioned works, Hawking radiation can be recovered under some suitable assumptions, as
long as neither the black-hole temperature nor the frequency at which the spectrum is considered are too
close to the scale of microphysics
. However, the applicability of these assumptions to the real case of
black hole evaporation is an open question. It is also important to stress that the mechanism by which the
Hawking radiation is recovered is conceptually rather different depending on the type of dispersion
relation considered. We concisely summarise here the main results (but see, e.g., [613
] for further
details).
The key feature is that in the presence of a subluminal modification the group velocity of the modes
increases with only up to some turning point (which is equivalent to saying that the group velocity does
not asymptote to
, which could be the speed of sound, but instead is upper bounded). For values of
beyond the turning point the group velocity decreases to zero (for Equation (304
)) or becomes imaginary
(for Equation (305
)). See Figure 15
for a schematic representation of this effect (for Equation (304
)). In
the latter case, this can be interpreted as signifying the breakdown of the regime where the dispersion
relation (305
) can be trusted. The picture that emerged from these analyses concerning the origin
of the outgoing Hawking modes at infinity is quite surprising. In fact, if one traces back in
time an outgoing mode, as it approaches the horizon, it decreases its group velocity below the
speed of sound. At some point before reaching the horizon, the outgoing mode will appear
as a combination of ingoing modes dragged into the black hole by the flow. Stepping further
back in time it is seen that such modes are located at larger and larger distances from the
horizon, and tend to have very high wave numbers far away at early times. The important point is
that one of the modes has “negative norm”. (That is, the norm is negative in the appropriate
Klein–Gordon-like inner product [35
].) In this way one finds what might be called a “mode conversion”,
where the origin of the outgoing Hawking quanta seems to originate from ingoing modes, which
have “bounced off” the horizon without reaching trans-Planckian frequencies in its vicinities.
Several detailed analytical and numerical calculations have shown that such a conversion indeed
happens [608
, 94
, 148, 147
, 283, 538, 613
, 413
, 412
] and that the Hawking result, specifically the
presence of a Planckian spectrum of particles at a temperature
moving outwards
toward the asymptotic region, can be recovered for
where
is the black-hole surface
gravity. In fact, the condition to recover a Planckian spectrum is a bit more subtle. In the mode
conversion process every frequency experiences the horizon as located at a different position,
and so, having a different surface gravity (a rainbow geometry). To have an approximately
Planckian spectrum one would need this frequency-dependent surface gravity to stay almost
constant for frequencies below and around
(see, for example, the analysis in [413
, 412
, 199
]).
This condition seems to be easily realizable. In addition, we would like to point out another
subtlety of these analogue black-hole configurations: It is necessary that the constant flow velocity
reached at the asymptotic region is different from zero. For the particular dispersion relation in
Equation (305
),
so that the Planckian form is not cut down at frequencies around
.
Let us mention here (more details in Section 6.1) that the classical counterpart of the above-described
mode-conversion mechanism has recently been observed for the first time in a wave tank experiment [682].
It is remarkable that the exponential factor associated with a black body spectrum is clearly observed even
with the inherent noise of the experiment. We will have to wait for the repetition of the same sort of
experiment in a more explicitly quantum system to observe the spontaneous production of particles with a
Planckian spectrum.
The understanding of the physics behind the presence of Hawking radiation in superluminal dispersive
theories has greatly improve recently through the detailed analysis of 1+1 stationary configurations
possessing one black or white horizon connecting two asymptotic regions [413] (for previous work dealing
with mode conversion through a horizon, see [386
]). One of the asymptotic regions corresponds to the
asymptotic region of a black-hole spacetime and is subsonic; the other asymptotic region is supersonic and
replaces the internal singularity. Once the appropriate acoustic geometry is defined, this analysis considers a
Klein–Gordon field equation in this geometry, modified by a
term that gives rise to the quartic
dispersion relation
. For this setup it has been shown that the relevant Bogoliubov
coefficients have the form
, with
a
matrix. To recover from these
coefficients a Planckian spectrum of particles at the external asymptotic region, the relevant condition
happens to be not
but
where
and with
a specific function
of
, the value of the flow velocity at the internal (or supersonic) asymptotic region [413
]. In
all cases, for
the Bogoliubov coefficients are exactly zero. When
is just
above
, that is, when the flow is only “slightly supersonic”, the function
can
become very small
, and thus also the critical frequency
at
which particle production is cut off. If this happens at frequencies comparable with
the
whole Planckian spectrum will be truncated and distorted. Therefore, to recover a Planckian
spectrum of particles at the external asymptotic region one needs to have a noticeable supersonic
region.
As with subsonic dispersion, the existence of a notion of rainbow geometry makes modes of different
frequency experience different surface gravities. One can think of the distortion of the Planckian spectrum
as having a running that, for these configurations, interpolates between its low energy, or geometric
value,
and a value of zero for
. This transition is remarkably sudden
for the smooth profiles analyzed. If
, then
will stay constant and equal to
throughout the relevant part of the spectrum reproducing Hawking’s result. However,
in general terms one can say that the spectrum takes into account the characteristic of the
profile deep inside the supersonic region (the analogue of the black hole interior). The existence
of superluminal modes makes it possible to obtain information from inside the (low energy)
horizon.
In these analyses based on stationary configurations, the quantum field was always assumed to be in the in-vacuum state. Is this vacuum state, which has thermal properties, in terms of out-observers? However, it is interesting to realise that the dispersive character of the theory allows one to select for these systems a different, perfectly regular state, which is empty of both incoming and outgoing particles in the external asymptotic region [35]. This state can be interpreted as the regular generalization to a dispersive theory of the Boulware state for a field in a stationary black hole (let us recall that this state is not regular at the horizons). This implies that, in principle, one could set up a semi-classically stable acoustic black hole geometry. Another important result of the analysis in [413] is that stationary white holes do also Hawking radiate and in a very similar way to black holes.
These analyses have been repeated for the specific case of the fluctuations of a BEC [412] with identical
qualitative results. The reasons for this is that, although the Bogoliubov–de Gennes system of equations is
different from the modified scalar field equation analyzed in previous papers, they share the same quartic
dispersion relation. Apart from the more formal treatments of BECs, Carusotto et al. reported [119
, 118
]
the numerical observation of the Hawking effect in simulations in which a black-hole horizon has been
created dynamically from an initially homogeneous flow. The observation of the effect has been through
the calculation of two-point correlation functions (see Section 5.1.6 below). These simulations
strongly suggest that any non-quasi-static formation of a horizon would give place to Hawking
radiation.
It is particularly interesting to note that this recovery of the standard result is not always guaranteed in
the presence of superluminal dispersion relations. Corley and Jacobson [150] in fact discovered a very
peculiar type of instability due to such superluminal dispersion in the presence of black holes with inner
horizons. The net result of the investigation carried out in [150
] is that the compact ergo-region
characterizing such configurations is unstable to self-amplifying Hawking radiation. The presence of
such an instability was also identified in the dynamical analysis carried on in [231
, 232
, 29
]
where Bose–Einstein condensate analogue black holes were considered. As we have already
mentioned, the spectrum associated with the formation of a black hole horizon in a superluminal
dispersive theory depends, in a more or less obvious fashion, on the entire form of the internal
velocity profile. In the case in which the internal region contains an additional white horizon,
the resulting spectrum is completely changed. These configurations, in addition to a steady
Hawking flux, produce a self-amplified particle emission; from this feature arises their name
“black-hole lasers”. In the recent analyses in [155
, 199
] it has been shown that the complete set
of modes to be taken into account in these configurations is composed of a continuous sector
with real frequencies, plus a discrete sector with complex frequencies of positive imaginary
part. These discrete frequencies encode the unstable behaviour of these configurations, and
are generated as resonant modes inside the supersonic cavity encompassed between the two
horizons.
Is it possible to reduce the rather complex phenomenology just described to a few basic assumptions that
must be satisfied in order to recover Hawking radiation in the presence of Lorentz-violating dispersion
relations? A tentative answer is given in [613], where the robustness of the Hawking result is considered for
general modified (subluminal as well as superluminal) dispersion relations. The authors of [613
]
assume that the geometrical optics approximation breaks down only in the proximity of the
event horizon (which is equivalent to saying that the particle production happens only in such
a region). Here, the would-be trans-Planckian modes are converted into sub-Planckian ones.
Then, they try to identify the minimal set of assumptions that guarantees that such “converted
modes” are generated in their ground states (with respect to a freely falling observer), as this is
a well-known condition in order to recover Hawking’s result. They end up identifying three
basic assumptions that guarantee such emergence of modes in the ground state at the horizon.
Of course, although several systems can be found in which such conditions hold, it is also possible to show [613] that realistic situations in which at least one of these assumptions is violated can be imagined. Hence, it is still an open question whether real black hole physics does indeed satisfy such conditions, and whether it is therefore robust against modifications induced by the violation of Lorentz invariance.
There is a point of view (not universally shared within the community) that asserts that the
trans-Planckian problem also makes it clear that the ray-optics limit cannot be the whole story behind
Hawking radiation. Indeed, it is precisely the ray optics approximation that leads to the trans-Planckian
problem. Presumably, once one goes beyond ray optics, to the wave optics limit, it will be the region within
a wavelength or so of the horizon (possibly the region between the horizon and the unstable circular photon
orbit) that proves to be quantum-mechanically unstable and will ultimately be the “origin” of
the Hawking photons. If this picture is correct, then the black-hole particle production is a
low-frequency and low-wavenumber process. See, for instance, [563, 610
, 611
]. Work along these lines is
continuing.
One issue that has become increasingly important, particularly in view of recent experimental advances, is the question of exactly which particular definition of surface gravity is the appropriate one for controlling the temperature of the Hawking radiation. In standard general relativity with Killing horizons there is no ambiguity, but there is already considerable maneuvering room once one goes to evolving horizons in general relativity, and even more ambiguities once one adopts modified dispersion relations (as is very common in analogue spacetimes).
Already at the level of time-dependent systems in standard general relativity there are two reasonably
natural definitions of surface gravity, one in terms of the inaffinity of null geodesics skimming along the
event horizon, and another in terms of the peeling properties of those null geodesics that escape the black
hole to reach future null infinity. It is this latter definition that is relevant for Hawking-like fluxes from
non-stationary systems (e.g., evaporating black holes) and in such systems it never coincides with the
inaffinity-based definition of the surface gravity except possibly at asymptotic future-timelike infinity .
Early comments along these lines can be found in [94, 95
]; more recently this point was highlighted
in [42, 41
].
Regarding analogue models of gravity, the conclusions do not change when working in the hydrodynamic
regime (where there is a strict analogy with GR). This point was implicitly made in [37, 41] and clearly
stressed in [412
]. If we now add modified dispersion relations, there are additional levels of complication
coming from the distinction between “group velocity horizons”, and “phase velocity horizons”, and the fact
that null geodesics have to be replaced by modified characteristic curves. The presence of dispersion also
makes explicit that the crucial notion underlying Hawking emission is the “peeling” properties of null ray
characteristics. For instance, the relevant “peeling” surface gravity for determining Hawking fluxes has to be
determined locally, in the vicinity of the Killing horizon, and over a finite frequency range.
(See for instance [612, 505
, 504
, 532
, 66
, 682
, 412
] for some discussion of this and related
issues.) This “surface gravity” is actually an emergent quantity coming from averaging the
naive surface gravity (the slope of the
–
profile) on a finite region around the would-be
Killing horizon associated with the acoustic geometry [200]. Work on these important issues is
ongoing.
While the robustness of Hawking radiation against UV violations of the acoustic Lorentz invariance seems a
well-established feature by now (at least in static or stationary geometries), its strength is indubitably a
main concern for a future detection of this effect in a laboratory. As we have seen, the Hawking temperature
in acoustic systems is simply related to the gradient of the flow velocity at the horizon (see
Equation (61)). This gradient cannot be made arbitrarily large and, for the hydrodynamic
approximation to hold, one actually needs it to be at least a few times the typical coherence length (e.g.,
the healing length for a BEC) of the superfluid used for the experiment. This implies that
in a cold system, with low speed of sound, like a BEC, the expected power loss due to the
Hawking emission could be estimated to be on the order of
(see, e.g., [48
]):
arguably too faint to be detectable above the thermal phonon background due to the finite
temperature of the condensate (alternatively, one can see that the Hawking temperature is
generally below the typical temperature of the BEC, albeit they are comparable and both in
the nano-Kelvin range). Despite this, it is still possible that a detection of the spontaneous
quantum particle creation can be obtained via some other feature rather than the spectrum of
the Hawking flux. A remarkable possibility in this sense is offered by the fact that vacuum
particle creation leads generically to a spectrum, which is (almost) Planckian but not thermal (in
the sense that all the higher order field correlators are trivial combinations of the two-point
one).23
Indeed, particles created by the mode mixing (Bogoliubov) mechanism are generically in a squeezed
state (in the sense that the in vacuum appears as a squeezed state when expressed in terms of the out
vacuum) [313] and such a state can be distinguished from a real thermal one exactly by the nontrivial
structure of its correlators. This discrimination mechanism was suggested a decade ago in the context of
dynamical Casimir effect explanations of Sonoluminescence [65], and later envisaged for analogue black
holes in [48], but was finally investigated and fully exploited only recently in a stream of papers
focussed on the BEC set up [22, 119, 412, 520, 19, 118
, 190, 496, 512
, 564, 604]. The outcome
of such investigations (carried out taking into account the full Bogoliubov spectrum) is quite
remarkable as it implies that indeed, while the Hawking flux is generically out-powered by the
condensate intrinsic thermal bath, it is, in principle, possible to have a clear cut signature of the
Hawking effect by looking at the density-density correlator for phonons on both sides of the
acoustic horizon. In fact, the latter will show a definite structure totally absent when the flow is
always subsonic or always supersonic. Even more remarkably, it was shown, both via numerical
simulations as well as via a detailed analytical investigation, that a realistic finite temperature
background does not spoil the long distance correlations which are intrinsic to the Hawking
effect (and, indeed, for non-excessively large condensate temperatures the correlations can be
amplified).
This seems to suggest that for the foreseeable future the correlation pattern will offer the most amenable
route for obtaining a clean signature of the (spontaneous) Hawking effect in acoustic analogues. (For
stimulated Hawking emission, see [682].) Finally, it is interesting to add that the correlator analysis can
be applied to a wider class of analogue systems, in particular it has been applied to analogue
black holes based on cold atoms in ion rings [290], or extended to the study of the particle
creation in time-varying external fields (dynamical Casimir effect) in Bose–Einstein condensates
(where the time-varying quantity is the scattering length via a Feshbach resonance) [118]. As we
shall see, such studies are very interesting for their possible application as cosmological particle
production simulations (possibly including Lorentz-violations effects). (See Section 5.4, and
[512].)
In spite of the remarkable insight given by the models discussed above (based on modified dispersion
relations) it is not possible to consider them fully satisfactory in addressing the trans-Planckian problem. In
particular, it was soon recognised [149, 311
] that in this framework it is not possible to explain the origin of
the short wavelength incoming modes, which are “progenitors” of the outgoing modes after bouncing off in
the proximity of the horizon. For example, in the Unruh model (304
), one can see that if one keeps tracking
a “progenitor” incoming mode back in time, then its group velocity (in the co-moving frame) drops to zero
as its frequency becomes more and more blue shifted (up to arbitrarily large values), just the situation one
was trying to avoid. This is tantamount to saying that the trans-Planckian problem has been
moved from the region near the horizon out to the region near infinity. In the Corley–Jacobson
model (305
) this unphysical behaviour is removed thanks to the presence of the physical cutoff
.
However, it is still true that in tracking the incoming modes back in time one finally sees a wave
packet so blue shifted that
. At this point one can no longer trust the dispersion
relation (305
) (which in realistic analogue models is emergent and not fundamental anyway), and
hence the model has no predictive power regarding the ultimate origin of the relevant incoming
modes.
These conclusions regarding the impossibility of clearly predicting the origin at early times of the modes
ultimately to be converted into Hawking radiation are not specific to the particular dispersion
relations (304) or (305
) one is using. In fact, the Killing frequency is conserved on a static background;
thus, the incoming modes must have the same frequency as the outgoing ones. Hence, in the case
of strictly Lorentz invariant dispersion relations there can be no mode-mixing and particle
creation. This is why one actually has to assume that the WKB approximation fails in the
proximity of the horizon and that the modes are there in the vacuum state for the co-moving
observer. In this sense, the need for these assumptions can be interpreted as evidence that these
models are not yet fully capable of solving the trans-Planckian problem. Ultimately, these issues
underpin the analysis by Schützhold and Unruh regarding the spatial “origin” of the Hawking
quanta [563, 610, 611].
It was to overcome this type of issue that alternative ways of introducing an ultra-violet cutoff due to the
microphysics were considered [522, 523, 149
]. In particular, in [523
] the transparency of the
refractive medium at high frequencies has been used to introduce an effective cutoff for the modes
involved in Hawking radiation in a classical refractive index analogue model (see Section 4.1.5). In
this model an event horizon for the electromagnetic field modes can be simulated by a surface
of singular electric and magnetic permeabilities. This would be enough to recover Hawking
radiation but it would imply the unphysical assumption of a refractive index, which is valid at any
frequency. However, it was shown in [523] that the Hawking result can be recovered even in
the case of a dispersive medium, which becomes transparent above some fixed frequency
(which we can imagine as the plasma frequency of the medium); the only (crucial) assumption
being again that the “trans-Planckian” modes with
are in their ground state near the
horizon.
An alternative avenue was considered in [149]. There a lattice description of the background was used
for imposing a cutoff in a more physical way with respect to the continuum dispersive models previously
considered. In such a discretised spacetime, the field takes values only at the lattice points, and wavevectors
are identified modulo
where
is the lattice characteristic spacing; correspondingly one obtains a
sinusoidal dispersion relation for the propagating modes. Hence, the problem of recovering a smooth
evolution of incoming modes to outgoing ones is resolved by the intrinsically-regularised behaviour of the
wave vectors field. In [149
] the authors explicitly considered the Hawking process for a discretised version
of a scalar field, where the lattice is associated with the free-fall coordinate system (taken as
the preferred system). With such a choice, it is possible to preserve a discrete lattice spacing.
Furthermore, the requirement of a fixed short-distance cutoff leads to the choice of a lattice spacing
constant at infinity, and that the lattice points are at rest at infinity and fall freely into the black
hole.24
In this case, the lattice spacing grows in time and the lattice points spread in space as they fall toward the
horizon. However, this time dependence of the lattice points is found to be of order
, and hence
unnoticeable to long-wavelength modes and relevant only for those with wavelengths on the order of the
lattice spacing. The net result is that, on such a lattice, long wavelength outgoing modes are seen to
originate from short wavelength incoming modes via a process analogous to the Bloch oscillations of
accelerated electrons in crystals [149, 311].
In addition, among the many papers using analogue spacetimes as part of their background mindset when addressing these issues we mention:
http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2011-3 |
Living Rev. Relativity 14, (2011), 3
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