We consider the interpretation of tetrad fields as reference frames in spacetime. Reference frames may be characterized by an antisymmetric acceleration tensor, whose components are identified as the inertial accelerations of the frame (the translational acceleration and the frequency of rotation of the frame). This tensor is closely related to gravitoelectromagnetic field quantities. We construct the set of tetrad fields adapted to observers that are in free fall in the Schwarzschild spacetime, and show that the gravitational energy-momentum constructed out of this set of tetrad fields, in the framework of the teleparallel equivalent of general relatrivity, vanishes. This result is in agreement with the principle of equivalence, and may be taken as a condition for a viable definition of gravitational energy.
We show that the field equations of the Schwarzschild geometry are invariant under passive Lorentz transformations to a freely falling system. We decompose the field equations with respect to the accelerated system and find that the force of gravity is not transformed away but dynamically compensated.
We study the motion of free masses subject to the influence of standing gravitational waves in the polarized Gowdy cosmology with a three-torus topology. We show that antinodes attract freely falling particles and we trace the velocity memory effect.
First sketch of black hole from M87 galaxy was obtained by Event Horizon Telescope, recently. As appearance of black hole shadow reflects space-time geometry of black holes, observations of black hole shadow may be a promising way to test general relativity in strong field regime. In this paper, we focus on angular radius of spherical black hole shadow with respect to freely falling observers. In the framework of general relativity, aberration formulation and angular radius-gravitational redshift relation are presented. For the sake of intuitive, we consider parametrized Schwarzschild black ho…
A good definition for the energy momentum tensor of gravity (EMTG) in General Relativity (GR) is a hard, if not impossible, task. On the other hand, in its teleparallel version, known as The Teleparallel Equivalent of General Relativity (TEGR), one can define the EMTG in a very satisfactory way. In this paper, it is proved that the EMTG of TEGR for linearized gravitational waves (GWs) is the same as the version of GR that is usually given in the literature. In addition, the exact version of the EMTG for a $pp-$wave with a $+$ polarization is obtained in a freely falling frame (FFF). Unlike the…
We analyze Hawking radiation as perceived by a freely-falling observer and try to draw an inference about the region of origin of the Hawking quanta. To do so, first we calculate the energy density from the stress energy tensor, as perceived by a freely-falling observer. Then we compare this with the energy density computed from an effective temperature functional which depends on the state of the observer. The two ways of computing these quantities show a mismatch at the light ring outside the black hole horizon. To better understand this ambiguity, we show that even taking into account the (…
We globally embed (3+1)-dimensional Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild-AdS black holes in massive gravity into (5+2)-dimensional flat spacetimes. Making use of embedding coordinates, we directly obtain the generalized Hawking, Unruh and freely falling temperatures in a Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild-AdS black hole due to massive graviton effects.
Free fall in a uniform gravitational field is revisited in the case of quantum states with and without classical analogue. The interplay between kinematics and dynamics in the evolution of a falling quantum test particle is discussed allowing for a better understanding of the equivalence principle at the operational level.
It is well-known that the Riemann curvature tensor has no discontinuity at the black hole horizon. It is also well-known that a freely falling observer takes finite time to reach the horizon from an outside point. However, the usual assumption is that such an observer resides in a frame of reference (spaceship) of infinitesimal size. This assumption is justified as long as the coordinates are continuous enough to assume that the observer's frame is small compared to the variations of the metric from a local flat metric. Such an assumption may be invalid when the coordinate system has not only …
An atom falling freely into a Kerr black hole in a Boulware-like vacuum is shown to emit radiation with a Planck spectrum at the Hawking temperature. For a cloud of falling atoms with random initial times, the radiation is thermal. The existence of this radiation is due to the acceleration of the vacuum field modes with respect to the falling atom. Its properties can be traced to the dominant role of conformal quantum mechanics (CQM) in the neighborhood of the event horizon. We display this effect for a scalar field, though the acceleration radiation has a universal conformal behavior that is …
We find radiation in an infalling frame and present an explicit analytic evidence of the failure of no drama condition by showing that an infalling observer finds an infinite negative energy density at the event horizon. The negative and positive energy density regions are divided by the newly defined zero-energy curve. The evaporating black hole is surrounded by the negative energy which can also be observed in the infalling frame.
We evaluate the accuracy to be expected for the measurement of free fall acceleration of antihydrogen in the GBAR experiment, accounting for the recoil transferred in the photodetachment process. We show that the uncertainty on the measurement of gravity comes mainly from the initial velocity dispersion in the ion trap so that the photodetachment recoil is not the limiting factor to the precision as a naive analysis would suggest. This result will ease the constraints on the choice of the photodetachment laser parameters.
We derive an expression for effective gravitational mass for any closed spacelike 2-surface. This effective gravitational energy is defined directly through the geometrical quantity of the freely falling 2-surface and thus is well adapted to intuitive expectation that the gravitational mass should be determined by the motion of test body moving freely in gravitational field. We find that this effective gravitational mass has reasonable positive value for a small sphere in the non-vacuum space-times and can be negative for vacuum case. Further, this effective gravitational energy is compared wi…
The structure of quantum vacuum in presence of gravity, and the corresponding vacuum energy density $ρ_{v}$, is expected to depend on the coupling between the UV scale $\ell_\mathrm{\textsf{UV}}$ and spacetime curvature. We determine this coupling in an arbitrary freely falling frame characterised by it's geodesic tangent $U^i(τ)$. We show that local vacuum modes within a small causal diamond based on $U^i(τ)$, whose size is set by wavelength of the modes, generically give a contribution $ρ_{0}$ to $ρ_v$ which, to leading order, scales as: $ρ_{0} = \left( π\hbar c/2 \right) {\mathrm{\textsf R}…
The time evolution of a two-level atom which is simultaneously exposed to the field of a running laser wave and a homogeneous gravitational field is studied. The result of the coupled dynamics of internal transitions and center-of-mass motion is worked out exactly. Neglecting spontaneous emission and performing the rotating wave approximation we derive the complete time evolution operator in an algebraical way by using commutation relations. The result is discussed with respect to the physical implications. In particular the long time and short time behaviour is physically analyzed in detail. …
We carry out the first investigation of the entanglement and mutual information harvesting protocols for detectors freely falling into a black hole. Working in $(1+1)$-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole spacetime, we consider two pointlike Unruh-DeWitt (UDW) detectors in different combinations of free-falling and static trajectories. Employing a generalization of relative velocity suitable for curved spacetimes, we find that the amount of correlations extracted from the black hole vacuum, at least outside the near-horizon regime, is largely kinematic in origin (i.e. it is mostly due to the r…
Dynamical evolution of black holes may be studied perturbatively in the membrane picture. We study the case of a body freely falling into a black hole, in the Rindler approximation. The motivation is to see if this process is accompanied by the induction of a non-zero supertranslation. Following previous studies, a notion of induction of supertranslation during a dynamical evolution is first introduced and then, the case of a freely falling body is investigated.
On the basis of the relativistic mass-energy concept we found that a proper mass of a test particle in a gravitational field depends on a potential energy, hence, a freely falling particle has a varying proper mass. Consequently, a multitude of freely falling reference frames cannot be regarded as a multitude of equivalent inertial reference frames. There is a class of experiments, in which an inner observer can distinguish between the state of free fall in a gravitational field and the state of free space by detecting the effect of a proper mass variation. If so, a demonstration of a violatio…
Acceleration Radiation of Freely Falling Atoms: Nonlinear Electrodynamic Effects
Eastern Mediterranean University（东地中海大学）；Mapúa University（马普阿大学）；Institute for Advanced Studies, New Uzbekistan University（新乌兹别克斯坦大学高级研究所）；Institute of Theoretical Physics, National University of Uzbekistan（乌兹别克斯坦国立大学理论物理研究所）；School of Physics, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学物理学院）；Tashkent University of Applied Sciences（塔什干应用科学大学）；Tashkent State Technical University（塔什干国立技术大学）
Freely falling point-like objects converge toward the center of the Earth. Hence the gravitational field of the Earth is inhomogeneous, and possesses a tidal component. The free fall of an extended quantum mechanical object such as a hydrogen atom prepared in a high principal-quantum-number state, i.e. a circular Rydberg atom, is predicted to fall more slowly than a classical point-like object, when both objects are dropped from the same height above the Earth's surface. This indicates that, apart from transitions between quantum states, the atom exhibits a kind of quantum mechanical incompres…
We present a quantum optics treatment of the near horizon behaviour of a quantum oscillator freely-falling into a pre-existing Schwarzschild black hole. We use Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates to define a global vacuum state. In contrast to an accelerated oscillator in the Minkowski vacuum, where there is no radiation beyond an initial transient, we find that the oscillator radiates positive energy to to infinity and negative energy into the black hole as it attempts to come into equilibrium with the ambient vacuum. We discuss the relationship of the model to Hawking radiation.
We compute the black hole horizon entanglement entropy S_E for a massless scalar field, first with a hard cutoff and then with high frequency dispersion, both imposed in a frame that falls freely across the horizon. Using WKB methods, we find that S_E is finite for a hard cutoff or super-luminal dispersion, because the mode oscillations do not diverge at the horizon and the contribution of high transverse momenta is cut off by the angular momentum barrier. For sub-luminal dispersion the entropy depends on the behavior at arbitrarily high transverse momenta. In all cases it scales with the hori…
I briefly argue for logical necessity to incorporate, besides c, hbar, two fundamental length scales in the symmetries associated with the interface of gravitational and quantum realms. Next, in order to clear the proverbial bush, I discuss the CPT and indistinguishability issue related to recent non-linear deformations of special relativity and suggest why algebraically well-defined extensions of special relativity do not require non-linear deformations. That done, I suggest why the stable Snyder-Yang-Mendes Lie algebra should be considered as a serious candidate for the symmetries underlying…
We study the Lamb shift of both freely-falling and static two-level atoms in interaction with quantized conformally coupled massless scalar fields in the de Sitter-invariant vacuum. We find that the Lamb shifts of both freely-falling and static atoms are in structural similarity to that of an inertial atom immersed in a thermal bath in a Minkowski spacetime. For the freely-falling atom, the Lamb shift gets a correction as if it was immersed in a thermal bath at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature, thus revealing clearly the intrinsic thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime. For the static atom, the …
We take a closer and new look at the effects of tidal forces on the free fall of a quantum particle inside a spherically symmetric gravitational field. We derive the corresponding Schrödinger equation for the particle by starting from the fully relativistic Klein-Gordon equation in order (i) to briefly discuss the issue of the equivalence principle and (ii) to be able to compare the relativistic terms in the equation to the tidal-force terms. To the second order of the nonrelativistic approximation, the resulting Schrödinger equation is that of a simple harmonic oscillator in the horizontal di…
Studying particle motion in the gravitational field of a black hole from the perspective of different observers is important for separating the coordinate artifacts from the physical phenomena. In this paper, we show that a freely falling test particle exhibits gravitational repulsion by a black hole as seen by an asymptotic observer, whereas nothing of the kind happens as recorded by a freely falling observer or by an observer located at a finite distance from the event horizon. This analysis is carried out for a general Reissner-Nordström, an extremal Reissner-Nordström, and a Schwarzschild …
It is argued that it takes an infinite amount of external time for a freely falling test particle to reach the event horizon of a classical black hole (which happens in finite faller time), and that in this time the black hole would have evaporated due to Hawking radiation; so the freely falling test particle would itself evaporate at the event horizon, and so not pass through.
We argue that the curvature generated by a gravitational field can be used to calculate the corresponding metric which determines the trajectories of freely falling test particles. To this end, we present a method to compute the metric from a given curvature tensor. We use Petrov's classification to handle the structure and properties of the curvature tensor, and Cartan's structure equations in an orthonormal tetrad to investigate the differential equations that relate the curvature with the metric. The second structure equation is integrated to obtain the explicit expression for the connectio…
In the context of the Teleparallel Equivalent of General Relativity (TEGR) we have investigated the role of local observers, associated with tetrad fields, in description of the gravitational interaction through the concepts of the gravitoelectric (GE) and gravitomagnetic (GM) fields. We start by analyzing the gravitoelectromagnetic (GEM) fields obtained from an observer freely falling in the Schwarzschild space-time. Then, we investigated whether it is possible to distinguish between this situation and to be at rest in the Minkowski space-time. We conclude that, although there are non-zero co…
A recent calculation shows that the observed energy density in the Unruh state at the future event horizon as seen by a freely falling observer is finite if the observer is released from rest at any positive distance outside the horizon; however, it is getting larger and larger so that it is negatively divergent at the horizon in the limit that the observer starts falling from rest at the horizon, which corresponds to the infinite boost with respect to the freely falling observer at a finite distance from the horizon. In order to resolve some conflicts between the recent calculation and the co…
The relation between Einstein equivalence principle and a continuous quantum measurement is analyzed in the context of the recently proposed flavor-oscillation clocks, an idea pioneered by Ahluwalia and Burgard (Gen. Rel Grav. Errata 29, 681 (1997)). We will calculate the measurement outputs if a flavor-oscillation clock, which is immersed in a gravitational field, is subject to a continuous quantum measurement. Afterwards, resorting to the weak equivalence principle, we obtain the corresponding quantities in a freely falling reference frame. Finally, comparing this last result with the measur…
The principle of equivalence is used to examine covariant descriptions of quantum phenomena within the global exterior of geometries described using Painlevé- Gullstrand coordinates, which are everywhere non-singular away from their center. The differences between the descriptions of observers stationary within the curvilinear geometry and those in a locally-flat freely-falling system that is momentarily at rest are found to depend only on local proper accelerations, becoming vanishingly small for increasingly distant observers. Away from the horizon, the local detections of outgoing massless …
We investigate a foliation of Schwarzschild spacetime determined by observers freely falling in the radial direction. This is described using a generalisation of Gullstrand-Painlevé coordinates which allows for any possible radial velocity. This foliation provides a contrast with the usual static foliation implied by Schwarzschild coordinates. The $3$-dimensional spaces are distinct for the static and falling observers, so the embedding diagrams, spatial measurement, simultaneity, and time at infinity are also distinct, though the $4$-dimensional spacetime is unchanged. Our motivation is conce…
We study the classical radiation emitted by free-falling charges in de Sitter spacetime coupled to different kinds of fields. Specifically we consider the cases of the electromagnetic field, linearized gravity and scalar fields with arbitrary mass and curvature coupling. Given an arbitrary set of such charges, there is a generic result for sufficiently late times which corresponds to each charge being surrounded by a field zone with negligible influence from the other charges. Furthermore, we explicitly find a static solution in the static patch adapted to a charge (implying no energy loss by …
In the framework of open quantum systems, we study the geometric phase acquired by freely falling and static two-level atoms interacting with quantized conformally coupled massless scalar fields in de Sitter-invariant vacuum. We find that, for the freely falling atom, the geometric phase gets a correction resulting from a thermal bath with the Gibbons-Hawking temperature, thus it clearly reveals the intrinsic thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime from a different physical context. For the static atom, there is a correction to the geometric phase coming from both the intrinsic thermal nature of…
Scalar field theory on a lattice falling freely into a 1+1 dimensional black hole is studied using both WKB and numerical approaches. The outgoing modes are shown to arise from incoming modes by a process analogous to a Bloch oscillation, with an admixture of negative frequency modes corresponding to the Hawking radiation. Numerical calculations show that the Hawking effect is reproduced to within 0.5% on a lattice whose proper spacing where the wavepacket turns around at the horizon is $\sim0.08$ in units where the surface gravity is 1.
Freely falling point-like objects converge towards the center of the Earth. Hence the gravitational field of the Earth is inhomogeneous, and possesses a tidal component. The free fall of an extended quantum object such as a hydrogen atom prepared in a high principal-quantum-number stretch state, i.e., a circular Rydberg atom, is predicted to fall more slowly that a classical point-like object, when both objects are dropped from the same height from above the Earth. This indicates that, apart from "quantum jumps," the atom exhibits a kind of "quantum incompressibility" during free fall in inhom…
An observer at rest in a uniformly accelerated reference frame experiences a parallel gravitational field, where the rays of light are formed as circular arcs instead of being straight lines. We deduce how a sphere at rest in the Rindler frame, and a freely falling sphere, will appear to an observer at rest in the frame.
Starting from the equations of motion in a 1 + 1 static, diagonal, Lorentzian spacetime, such as the Schwarzschild radial line element, I find another metric, but with Euclidean signature, which produces the same geodesics x(t). This geodesically equivalent, or dual, metric can be embedded in ordinary Euclidean space. On the embedded surface freely falling particles move on the shortest path. Thus one can visualize how acceleration in a gravitational field is explained by particles moving freely in a curved spacetime. Freedom in the dual metric allows us to display, with substantial curvature,…
We consider, in de Sitter spacetime, both freely falling and static two-level atoms in interaction with a conformally coupled massless scalar field in the de Sitter-invariant vacuum, and separately calculate the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the atom's spontaneous excitation rate. We find that spontaneous excitations occur even for the freely falling atom as if there is a thermal bath of radiation at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature and we thus recover, in a different physical context, the results of Gibbons and Hawking that reveals the thermal nature of de Sitt…
We study the spacetime noncommutative effect on black hole as particle accelerators and, find that particle falling from infinity with zero velocity cannot collide with unbound energy when the noncommutative Kerr black hole is exactly extremal. Our results also show that the bigger of the spinning black hole's mass is, the higher of center of mass energy that the particles obtain. For small and medium noncommutative Schwarzschild black hole, the collision energy depends on the black holes' mass.
We initiate the development of a horizon-based initial (or rather final) value formalism to describe the geometry and physics of the near-horizon spacetime: data specified on the horizon and a future ingoing null boundary determine the near-horizon geometry. In this initial paper we restrict our attention to spherically symmetric spacetimes made dynamic by matter fields. We illustrate the formalism by considering a black hole interacting with a) inward-falling, null matter (with no outward flux) and b) a massless scalar field. The inward-falling case can be exactly solved from horizon data. Fo…
In this paper we discuss the Casimir effect in a small cavity, freely falling from spatial infinity in spacetime geometry outside of a Schwarzschild black hole. Our main goal is to search for possible changes in the vacuum energy, as well as particle creation inside the falling cavity, with respect to a comoving observer. Working in the Lemaître chart and assuming a cavity size $L$ much smaller than the Schwarzschild radius ($L/r_g\ll 1$), we solve the Klein-Gordon equation for a massless scalar field confined within the cavity in the reference frame of the comoving observer. We follow Schwing…
Freely falling point particles in the vicinity of Kerr black holes are subject to a conservation law, that of their Carter constant. We consider the conjecture that this conservation law is a special case of a more general conservation law, valid for arbitrary processes obeying local energy momentum conservation. Under some fairly general assumptions we prove that the conjecture is false: there is no conservation law for conserved stress-energy tensors on the Kerr background that reduces to conservation of Carter for a single point particle.
No, it cannot in the following sense if a self-gravitating vacuum brane is concerned. Once we write down the full set of linear perturbation equations of the system containing a self-gravitating brane, we will see that such a brane does not have its own dynamical degrees of freedom independent of those of gravitational waves which propagate in the surrounding spacetime. This statement seems to contradict with our intuition that a brane fluctuates freely on a given background spacetime in the lowest order approximation. Based on this intuition, we usually think that the dynamics of a brane can …
Solutions of vacuum Einstein's field equations describing uniformly accelerated particles or black holes belong to the class of boost-rotation symmetric spacetimes. They are the only explicit solutions known which represent moving finite objects. Their Newtonian limit is analyzed using the Ehlers frame theory. Generic spacetimes with axial and boost symmetries are first studied from the Newtonian perspective. The results are then illustrated by specific examples such as C-metric, Bonnor-Swaminarayan solutions, self-accelerating "dipole particles", and generalized boost-rotation symmetric solut…
I examine the interpretation of photon redshifts in curved spacetime, as being gravitational or Doppler in origin. In Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker spacetime, redshifts between comoving observers are often attributed to "expanding space", whereas in Schwarzschild spacetime, redshifts between static observers are attributed to "gravitational" causes. Yet various authors have suggested a freely falling observer congruence would interpret any redshift as Doppler, whereas a rigid congruence must interpret it as gravitational since there is no relative motion. I realise this proposal by expli…
It is shown that the Nachtmann boosting method of introducing coordinates on de Siter manifolds can be completed with suitable gauge transformations able to keep under control the transformation under isometries of the conserved quantities. With this method, the rest local charts (or natural frames) are defined pointing out the role of the conserved quantities in investigating the relative geodesic motion. The advantages of this approach can be seen from the applications presented here. For the first time, the simple kinematic effects, the electromagnetic field of a free falling charge and the…
Scalar field vacuum energy and particle creation in a 3D Casimir apparatus, freely falling in the Schwarzschild spacetime, are considered in the reference frame of a comoving observer. Following Schwinger's proper time approach, Casimir energy is evaluated from the effective action, resulting in a small correction to the flat spacetime case. Besides, a tiny amount of quanta excited out from the vacuum is found. Both effects are discussed, drawing attention to the role of the underlying spacetime dimensionality.
