The observation of quantum Hawking radiation and its entanglement in an analogue black hole was recently reported. A subsequent note (arXiv:1609.03803) criticized the study. Version 2 of the note was recently presented. The note suffers from technical difficulties which invalidate its main claims. We answer all of the comments in the note and show that the criticisms are not valid. We also answer a comment made by the author of the note in a different forum.
We show that spherical accretion onto astrophysical black holes can be considered as a natural example of analogue system. We provide, for the first time, an exact analytical scheme for calculating the analogue Hawking temperature and surface gravity for general relativistic accretion onto astrophysical black holes. Our calculation may bridge the gap between the theory of transonic astrophysical accretion and the theory of analogue Hawking radiation. We show that the domination of the analogue Hawking temperature over the actual Hawking temperature may be a real astrophysical phenomena. We als…
We observe spontaneous Hawking radiation, stimulated by quantum vacuum fluctuations, emanating from an analogue black hole in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. Correlations are observed between the Hawking particles outside the black hole and the partner particles inside. These correlations indicate an approximately thermal distribution of Hawking radiation. We find that the high energy pairs are entangled, while the low energy pairs are not, within the reasonable assumption that excitations with different frequencies are not correlated. The entanglement verifies the quantum nature of the Ha…
Stimulated emission by black holes is discussed in light of the analogue gravity program. We first consider initial quantum states containing a definite number of particles, and then we take into account the case where the initial state is a coherent state. The latter case is particularly significant in the case where Hawking radiation is studied in dielectric black holes, and the emission is stimulated by a laser probe. We are particularly interested in the case of the electromagnetic field, for which stimulated radiation is calculated too.
Hawking radiation, despite being known to theoretical physics for nearly forty years, remains elusive and undetected. It also suffers, in its original context of gravitational black holes, from practical and conceptual difficulties. Of particular note is the trans-Planckian problem, which is concerned with the apparent origin of the radiation in absurdly high frequencies. In order to gain better theoretical understanding and, it is hoped, experimental verification of Hawking radiation, much study is being devoted to laboratory systems which use moving media to model the spacetime geometry of b…
We analytically study the low-frequency properties of the analogue Hawking effect in Bose-Einstein condensates. We show that in one-dimensional flows displaying an analogue horizon, the Hawking effect is dominant in the low-frequency regime. This happens despite non vanishing greybody factors, that is, the coupling of the Hawking mode and its partner to the mode propagating with the flow. To show this, we obtained analytical expressions for the scattering coefficients, in general flows and taking into account the full Bogoliubov dispersion relation. We discuss the obtained expressions for the …
The conversion of positive-frequency waves into negative-frequency waves at the event horizon is the mechanism at the heart of the Hawking radiation of black holes. In black-hole analogues, horizons are formed for waves propagating in a medium against the current when and where the flow exceeds the wave velocity. We report on the first direct observation of negative-frequency waves converted from positive-frequency waves in a moving medium. The measured degree of mode conversion is significantly higher than expected from theory.
We theoretically study the entanglement of Hawking radiation pairs emitted by an analogue black hole. We find that this entanglement can be measured by the experimentally accessible density-density correlation function, vastly simplifying the measurement. We find that while the Hawking radiation exiting the black hole might be Planck-distributed, the correlations between the Hawking radiation and the partner particles has a distribution which is weaker but broader than Planckian. Thus, the high energy tail of the distribution of Hawking radiation should be entangled, whereas the low energy par…
We consider further on the problem of the analogue Hawking radiation. We propose a fourth order ordinary differential equation, which allows to discuss the problem of Hawking radiation in analogue gravity in a unified way, encompassing fluids and dielectric media. In a suitable approximation, involving weak dispersive effects, WKB solutions are obtained far from the horizon (turning point), and furthermore an equation governing the behaviour near the horizon is derived, and a complete set of analytical solutions is obtained also near the horizon. The subluminal case of the original fluid model…
We measure the correlation spectrum of the Hawking radiation emitted by an analogue black hole and find it to be thermal at the Hawking temperature implied by the analogue surface gravity. The Hawking radiation is in the regime of linear dispersion, in analogy with a real black hole. Furthermore, the radiation inside of the black hole is seen to be composed of negative-energy partners only. This work confirms the prediction of Hawking's theory regarding the value of the Hawking temperature, as well as the thermality of the spectrum. The thermality of Hawking radiation is the root of the inform…
We present a method for exploring analogue Hawking radiation using a laser pulse propagating through an underdense plasma. The propagating fields in the Hawking effect are local perturbations of the plasma density and laser amplitude. We derive the dependence of the resulting Hawking temperature on the dimensionless amplitude of the laser and the behaviour of the spot area of the laser at the analogue event horizon. We demonstrate one possible way of obtaining the analogue Hawking temperature in terms of the plasma wavelength, and our analysis shows that for a high intensity near-IR laser the …
Our knowledge of dynamical black holes suffers from a lack of observational insight. In an analogue model of gravity, we can design a longitudinally symmetric dynamical acoustic black hole with a moving horizon. In this symmetric spacetime, the marginally outer trapped surface and the so called evolving horizon are degenerate. Interestingly, there are many ways of assigning a surface gravity to the horizon in the absence of time translation invariance. Here, we present two of them that are distinguished by whether they are defined only locally or take into account the global properties of spac…
We determine the feasibility of detecting analogue Hawking radiation in a Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of atom loss induced heating. We find that phonons created by three-body losses overshadow those due to analogue Hawking radiation. To overcome this problem, three-body losses may have to be suppressed, for example as proposed by Search et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 140401 (2004)]. The reduction of losses to a few percent of their normal rate is typically sufficient to suppress the creation of loss phonons on the time scale of a fast analogue Hawking phonon detection.
We derive analytic expressions for the low-frequency properties of the analogue Hawking radiation in a general weak-dispersive medium. A thermal low-frequency part of the spectrum is expected even when dispersive effects become significant. We consider the two most common class of weak-dispersive media and investigate all possible anomalous scattering processes due inhomogeneous background flows. We first argue that under minimal assumptions, the scattering processes in near-critical flows are well described by a linearized Korteweg-de Vries equation. Within our theoretical model greybody fact…
There is an analogy between the propagation of fields on a curved spacetime and shallow water waves in an open channel flow. By placing a streamlined obstacle into an open channel flow we create a region of high velocity over the obstacle that can include wave horizons. Long (shallow water) waves propagating upstream towards this region are blocked and converted into short (deep water) waves. This is the analogue of the stimulated Hawking emission by a white hole (the time inverse of a black hole). The measurements of amplitudes of the converted waves demonstrate that they appear in pairs and …
In 1981 Unruh proposed that fluid mechanical experiments could be used to probe key aspects of the quantum phenomenology of black holes. In particular, he claimed that an analogue to Hawking radiation could be created within a fluid mechanical `dumb hole', with the event horizon replaced by a sonic horizon. Since then an entire sub-field of `analogue gravity' has been created. In 2016 Steinhauer reported the experimental observation of quantum Hawking radiation and its entanglement in a Bose-Einstein condensate analogue black hole. What can we learn from such analogue experiments? In particula…
The sonic analogue of Hawking radiation can now be experimentally recreated in Bose-Einstein Condensates that contain an acoustic black hole. In these experiments the signal strength and analogue Hawking temperature increase for denser condensates, which however also suffer increased atom losses from inelastic collisions. To determine how these affect analogue Hawking radiation, we numerically simulate creation of the latter in a Bose-Einstein Condensate in the presence of atomic losses. In particular we explore modifications of density-density correlations through which the radiation has been…
In this paper we consider possible analogue Hawking radiation from a normal dielectric and metamaterial composite, having an analogue horizon where the dielectric parameters vanish and change sign upon crossing this transition zone. We follow a complex path analysis to show the presence of an analogue Hawking temperature at the horizon and subsequent photon production from the ambient electromagnetic field. Possibility of experimental observation is also commented upon.
Analogue gravity experiments make feasible the realisation of black hole spacetimes in a laboratory setting and the observational verification of Hawking radiation. Since such analogue systems are typically dominated by dispersion, efficient techniques for calculating the predicted Hawking spectrum in the presence of strong dispersion are required. In the preceding paper, an integral method in Fourier space is proposed for stationary $1+1$-dimensional backgrounds which are asymptotically symmetric. Here, this method is generalised to backgrounds which are different in the asymptotic regions to…
We study the quantum fluctuations in a one dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate realizing an analogous acoustic black hole. The taking into account of evanescent channels and of zero modes makes it possible to accurately reproduce recent experimental measurements of the density correlation function. We discuss the determination of Hawking temperature and show that in our model the analogous radiation presents some significant departure from thermality.
We propose the use of a superconducting waveguide formed from an array of dc-SQUID's for investigating analogue Hawking radiation. Biasing the array with a space-time varying flux modifies the propagation velocity of the waveguide, leading to an effective metric with an horizon. Being a fundamentally quantum mechanical device, this setup allows for investigations of quantum effects such as back-reaction and analogue space-time fluctuations on the Hawking process.
This note analyses on the long wavelength dynamics of a two horizon analogue black hole system in one spatial dimension. By introducing an effective scalar-dilaton model we show that closed form expressions can be obtained for the time-dependent Hawking flux and the energy density of the Hawking radiation. We show that, in the absence superluminal modes, there is a vacuum instability. This instability is recognisable to relativists as the analogue to the destabilisation of the Cauchy horizon of a black hole due to vacuum polarization.
We obtain the analytic solutions of the radial part of the massless Klein-Gordon equation in the spacetime of both three dimensional rotating and four dimensional canonical acoustic black holes, which are given in terms of the confluent Heun functions. From these solutions, we obtain the scalar waves near the acoustic horizon. We discuss the analogue Hawking radiation of massless scalar particles and the features of the spectrum associated with the radiation emitted by these acoustic black holes.
These notes introduce the fundamentals of black hole geometry, the thermality of the vacuum, and the Hawking effect, in spacetime and its analogues. Stimulated emission of Hawking radiation, the trans-Planckian question, short wavelength dispersion, and white hole radiation in the setting of analogue models are also discussed. No prior knowledge of differential geometry, general relativity, or quantum field theory in curved spacetime is assumed.
Propagation of coherent light in a Kerr nonlinear medium can be mapped onto a flow of an equivalent fluid. Here we use this mapping to model the conditions in the vicinity of a rotating black hole as a Laguerre-Gauss vortex beam. We describe weak fluctuations of the phase and amplitude of the electric field by wave equations in curved space, with a metric that is similar to the Kerr metric. We find the positions of event horizons and ergoregion boundaries, and the conditions for the onset of superradiance, which are simultaneously the conditions for a resonance in the analogue Hawking radiatio…
We study the back-reaction associated with Hawking evaporation of an acoustic canonical analogue black hole in a Bose-Einstein condensate. We show that the emission of Hawking radiation induces a local back-reaction on the condensate, perturbing it in the near-horizon region, and a global back-reaction in the density distribution of the atoms. We discuss how these results produce useful insights into the process of black hole evaporation and its compatibility with a unitary evolution.
Hawking radiation, the spontaneous emission of thermal photons from an event horizon, is one of the most intriguing and elusive predictions of field theory in curved spacetimes. A formally analogue phenomenon occurs at the supersonic transition of a fluid: in this respect, ultracold gases stand out among the most promising systems but the theoretical modelling of this effect has always been carried out in semiclassical approximation, borrowing part of the analysis from the gravitational analogy. Here we discuss the exact solution of a one-dimensional Bose gas flowing against an obstacle, showi…
Hawking radiation was originally proposed in astrophysics, but it has been generalized and extended to other physical systems receiving the name of analogue Hawking radiation. In the last two decades, several attempts have been made to measure it in a laboratory, one of the most successful systems is in optics. Light interacting in a dielectric material causes an analogue Hawking effect, in fact, its stimulated version has already been detected and the search for the spontaneous signal is currently ongoing. We briefly review the general derivation of Hawking radiation, then we focus on the opt…
We use the identification of the edge mode of the filling fraction $ν=1$ quantum Hall phase with a 1+1 dimensional chiral Dirac fermion to construct an analogue model for a chiral fermion in a space-time geometry possessing an event horizon. By solving the model in the lowest Landau level, we show that the event horizon emits particles and holes with a thermal spectrum. Each emitted quasiparticle is correlated with an opposite-energy partner on the other side of the event horizon. Once we trace out these "unobservable" partners, we are left with a thermal density matrix.
The constant curvature (CC) black holes are higher dimensional generalizations of BTZ black holes. It is known that these black holes have the unusual topology of ${\cal M}_{D-1}\times S^1$, where $D$ is the spacetime dimension and ${\cal M}_{D-1}$ stands for a conformal Minkowski spacetime in $D-1$ dimensions. The unusual topology and time-dependence for the exterior of these black holes cause some difficulties to derive their thermodynamic quantities. In this work, by using globally embedding approach, we obtain the Hawking temperature of the CC black holes. We find that the Hawking temperat…
We study the quantum entanglement of the quasiparticle pairs emitted by analogue black holes. We use a phenomenological description of the spectra in dispersive media to study the domains in parameter space where the final state is non-separable. In stationary flows, three modes are involved in each sector of fixed frequency, and not two as in homogeneous situations. The third spectator mode acts as an environment for the pairs, and the strength of the coupling significantly reduces the quantum coherence. The non-separability of the pairs emitted by white holes are also considered, and compare…
A recent article [J. Steinhauer, Nat. Phys. 12, 959 (2016)] has reported the observation of quantum Hawking radiation and its entanglement in an analogue black hole. This paper analyses the published evidence, its consistency with theoretical bounds and the statistical significance of the results. The analysis raises severe doubts on the observation of Hawking radiation.
Inspired by a recent experiment by Steinhauer and co-workers, we present a simple model which describes the formation of an acoustic black hole in a Bose-Einstein condensate, allowing an analytical computation of the evolution in time of the corresponding density-density correlator. We show the emergence of analog Hawking radiation out of a "quantum atmosphere" region significantly displaced from the horizon. This is quantitatively studied both at $T=0$ and even in the presence of an initial temperature T, as is always the case experimentally.
Arising out of a Non-local non-relativistic BEC, we present an Analogue gravity model upto $\mathcal{O}(ξ^{2})$ accuracy in the presence of the quantum potential term for a canonical acoustic BH in $(3+1)$-d spacetime where the series solution of the free minimally coupled KG equation for the large length scale massive scalar modes is derived. We systematically address the issues of the presence of the quantum potential term being the root cause of a UV-IR coupling between short wavelength `primary' modes which are supposedly Hawking radiated through the sonic horizon and the large wavelength …
For axially symmetric flow of dissipationless inhomogeneous fluid onto a non rotating astrophysical black hole under the influence of a generalized pseudo-Schwarzschild gravitational potential, we investigate the influence of the background flow configuration on determining the salient features of the corresponding acoustic geometry. The acoustic horizon for the aforementioned flow structure has been located and the corresponding acoustic surface gravity $κ$ as well as the associated analogue Hawking temperature $T_{\rm AH}$ has been calculated {\it analytically}. The dependence of $κ$ on the …
We study in detail the scattering of light on a soliton propagating in a waveguide which has been proposed as an experimental system in which one could observe the analogue Hawking effect. When not applying the rotating wave approximation, we show that the linearized wave equation governing perturbations has the same structure as that governing phonon propagation in an atomic Bose condensate. By taking into account the full dispersion relation, we then show that the scattering coefficients encoding the production of photon pairs are amplified by a resonance effect related to the modulation ins…
We propose the use of a waveguide-like transmission line based on direct-current superconducting quantum interference devices (dc-SQUID) and study the sine-Gordon (SG) equation which characterises the dynamical behavior of the superconducting phase in this transmission line. Guided by the duality between black holes in Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) dilaton gravity and solitons in sine-Gordon field theory, we show how to, in our setup, realize 1 + 1 dimensional black holes as solitons of the sine-Gordon equation. We also study the analogue Hawking radiation in terms of the quantum soliton evaporation,…
Information loss paradox is still a challenging problem in theoretical physics. In this essay, for statics BTZ black holes and Schwarzschild black holes, we propose a simple solution based on the similarity between black holes and topological insulators. That is, the Hawking radiation is pure due to the entanglement between the left-moving sector and right-moving sector of the Hawking radiation. And this entanglement may be detected in an analogue black hole in the near future.
We study and numerically compute the scattering coefficients of shallow water waves blocked by a stationary counterflow. When the flow is transcritical, the coefficients closely follow Hawking's prediction according to which black holes should emit a thermal spectrum. We study how the spectrum deviates from thermality when reducing the maximal flow velocity, with a particular attention to subcritical flows since these have been recently used to test Hawking's prediction. For such flows, we show that the emission spectrum is strongly suppressed, and that its Planckian character is completely lo…
We take into account two further physical models which play an utmost importance in the framework of Analogue Gravity. We first consider Bose--Einstein condensates (BEC) and then surface gravity waves in water. Our approach is based on the use of the master equation we introduced in a previous work. A more complete analysis of the singular perturbation problem involved, with particular reference to the behavior in the neighbourhood of the (real) turning point and its connection with the WKB approximation, allows us to verify the thermal character of the particle production process. Furthermore…
We demonstrate that a spherical accretion onto astrophysical black holes, under the influence of Newtonian or various post-Newtonian pseudo-Schwarzschild gravitational potentials, may constitute a concrete example of classical analogue gravity naturally found in the Universe. We analytically calculate the corresponding analogue Hawking temperature as a function of the minimum number of physical parameters governing the accretion flow. We study both the polytropic and the isothermal accretion. We show that unlike in a general relativistic spherical accretion, analogue white hole solutions can n…
Classical black hole analogues (alternatively, the analogue systems) are fluid dynamical analogue of general relativistic black holes. Such analogue effects may be observed when acoustic perturbations (sound waves) propagate through a classical dissipation-less tran-sonic fluid. The acoustic horizon, which resembles the actual black hole event horizon in many ways, may be generated at the transonic point in the fluid flow. Acoustic horizon emits quasi thermal phonon spectra, which is analogous to the actual Hawking radiation, and possesses the temperature referred as the analogue Hawking tempe…
Quantum effects of fields on curved spacetimes may be studied in the laboratory thanks to quantum fluids. Here we use a polariton fluid to study the Hawking effect, the correlated emission from the quantum vacuum at the acoustic horizon. We show how out-of-equilibrium physics affects the dispersion relation, and hence the emission and propagation of correlated waves: the fluid properties on either side of the horizon are critical to observing the Hawking effect. We find that emission may be optimised by supporting the phase and density of the fluid upstream of the horizon in a regime of optica…
There is a mathematical analogy between the propagation of fields in a general relativistic space-time and long (shallow water) surface waves on moving water. Hawking argued that black holes emit thermal radiation via a quantum spontaneous emission. Similar arguments predict the same effect near wave horizons in fluid flow. By placing a streamlined obstacle into an open channel flow we create a region of high velocity over the obstacle that can include wave horizons. Long waves propagating upstream towards this region are blocked and converted into short (deep water) waves. This is the analogu…
A general bound on the Lyapunov exponent of a quantum system is given by $λ_L\leq2π\,T/\hbar$, where $T$ is the system temperature, as established by Maldacena, Shenker, and Stanford (MSS). This upper bound is saturated when the system under consideration is the exact holographic dual of a black hole. It has also been shown that an inverted harmonic oscillator (IHO) may exhibit the behavior of thermal energy emission, in close analogy to the Hawking radiation emitted by black holes. We demonstrate that the Lyapunov exponent of the IHO indeed saturates the MSS bound, with an effective temperatu…
