In the context of analog gravity the Hawking effect can be generalized to domains outside astrophysics. Arguably, the most successful systems for this analogy have been so far the sonic and the optical ones. However, problems arise in the analog systems as their dispersive effects are too large to be ignored, and this in turn modifies the usual thermal spectrum of Hawking radiation. In this work we perform analytical and numerical studies on how the velocity profile modifies the Hawking temperature in dispersive media, including some with direct experimental application.
Hawking radiation, despite its presence in theoretical physics for over thirty years, remains elusive and undetected. It also suffers, in its original context of gravitational black holes, from 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 systems which model the spacetime geometry of black holes, and which, by analogy, are also t…
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 consider the wave equation for sound in a moving fluid with a fourth-order anomalous dispersion relation. The velocity of the fluid is a linear function of position, giving two points in the flow where the fluid velocity matches the group velocity of low-frequency waves. We find the exact solution for wave propagation in the flow. The scattering shows amplification of classical waves, leading to spontaneous emission when the waves are quantized. In the dispersionless limit the system corresponds to a 1+1-dimensional black-hole or white-hole binary and there is a thermal spectrum of Hawking …
We compute the black hole radiation spectrum in the presence of high-frequency dispersion in a large set of situations. In all cases, the spectrum diverges like the inverse of the Killing frequency. When studying the low-frequency spectrum, we find only two regimes: an adiabatic one where the corrections with respect to the standard temperature are small, and an abrupt one regulated by dispersion, in which the near-horizon metric can be replaced by step functions. The transition from one regime to the other is governed by a single parameter which also governs the net redshift undergone by disp…
Motivated by recent experimental efforts, we study a black hole analog induced by the propagation of a strong laser pulse in a nonlinear dielectric medium. Based on the Hopfield model (one pair of Sellmeier coefficients), we perform an analytic and fully relativistic microscopic derivation of the analog of Hawking radiation in this setup. The Hawking temperature is determined by the analog of the surface gravity (as expected), but we also find a frequency-dependent gray-body factor (i.e., a nonthermal spectrum at infinity) due to the breaking of conformal invariance in this setup.
Hawking radiation has become experimentally testable thanks to the many analogue systems which mimic the effects of the event horizon on wave propagation. These systems are typically dominated by dispersion, and give rise to a numerically soluble and stable ODE only if the rest-frame dispersion relation $Ω^{2}(k)$ is a polynomial of relatively low degree. Here we present a new method for the calculation of wave scattering in a one-dimensional medium of arbitrary dispersion. It views the wave equation as an integral equation in Fourier space, which can be solved using standard and efficient num…
We investigate entanglement of the Hawking radiation in a dispersive model with subluminal dispersion. In this model, feature of the Hawking radiation is represented by three mode Bogoliubov transformation connecting the in-vacuum state and the out-state. We obtain the exact form of the tripartite in-vacuum state which encodes structure of multipartite entanglement. Bogoliubov coefficients are computed by numerical calculation of the wave equation with subluminal dispersion and it is found that genuine tripartite entanglement persists in whole frequency range up to the cutoff arisen from the s…
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…
The two main predictions of quantum field theory in curved space-time, namely Hawking radiation and cosmological pair production, have not been directly tested and involve ultra high energy configurations. As a consequence, they should be considered with caution. Using the analogy with condensed matter systems, their analogue versions could be tested in the lab. Moreover, the high energy behavior of these systems is known and involves dispersion and dissipation, which regulate the theory at short distances. When considering experiments which aim to test the above predictions, there will also b…
We set up a tunneling approach to the analogue Hawking effect in the case of models of analogue gravity which are affected by dispersive effects. An effective Schroedinger-like equation for the basic scattering phenomenon IN->P+N*, where IN is the incident mode, P is the positive norm reflected mode, and N* is the negative norm one, signalling particle creation, is derived, aimed to an approximate description of the phenomenon. Horizons and barrier penetration play manifestly a key-role in giving rise to pair-creation. The non-dispersive limit is also correctly recovered. Drawbacks of the mode…
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…
It is well established that linear dispersive modes in a flowing quantum fluid behave as though they are coupled to an Einstein-Hilbert metric and exhibit a host of phenomena coming from quantum field theory in curved space, including Hawking radiation. We extend this analogy to any nonrelativistic Goldstone mode in a flowing spinor Bose-Einstein condensate. In addition to showing the linear dispersive result for all such modes, we show that the quadratically dispersive modes couple to a special nonrelativistic spacetime called a Newton-Cartan geometry. The kind of spacetime (Einstein-Hilbert …
We consider the so-called Hopfield model for the electromagnetic field in a dielectric dispersive medium in a framework in which one allows a space-time dependence of microscopic parameters, aimed to a phenomenological description of a space-time varying dielectric perturbation induced by means of the Kerr effect. We discuss the analogue Hawking effect, by first analyzing the geometrical optics for the Hopfield model, and then by introducing a simplified model which has the bonus to avoid many difficulties which are involved in the full Hopfield model, still keeping the same dispersion relatio…
We study the problem of the definition of the energy-momentum tensor of light in general moving non-dispersive media with linear constitutive law. Using the basic principles of classical field theory, we show that for the correct understanding of the problem, one needs to carefully distinguish situations when the material medium is modeled either as a background on which light propagates or as a dynamical part of the total system. In the former case, we prove that the (generalized) Belinfante-Rosenfeld (BR) tensor for the electromagnetic field coincides with the Minkowski tensor. We derive a c…
In 2016, the Nottingham group detected the rotational superradiance effect. While this experiment demonstrated the robustness of the superradiance process, it still lacks a complete theoretical description due to the many effects at stage in the experiment. In this paper, we shine new light on this experiment by deriving an estimate of the reflection coefficient in the dispersive regime by means of a WKB analysis. This estimate is used to evaluate the reflection coefficient spectrum of counter rotating modes in the Nottingham experiment. Our finding suggests that the vortex flow in the superra…
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…
In this work we extend the approach used in [Emanuel Gallo and Osvaldo M. Moreschi, Phys. Rev. D 83, 12 083007 (2011)] to the study of weak gravitational lensing in a plasma medium. First, we present expressions for the deflection angle and optical scalars in terms of the components of the energy-momentum tensor for spherically symmetric lenses surrounded by a cold non-magnetized plasma. Second, we show that the same expressions can be deduced using the Gauss-Bonnet theorem. Finally, we establish a correspondence between the spatial orbits of photons in a non-homogeneous plasma and the non-geo…
We study the propagation of low frequency shallow water waves on a one dimensional flow of varying depth. When taking into account dispersive effects, the linear propagation of long wavelength modes on uneven bottoms excites new solutions of the dispersion relation which possess a much shorter wavelength. The peculiarity is that one of these new solutions has a negative energy. When the flow becomes supercritical, this mode has been shown to be responsible for the (classical) analog of the Hawking effect. For subcritical flows, the production of this mode has been observed numerically and expe…
Using the action principle we first review how linear density perturbations (sound waves) in an Eulerian fluid obey a relativistic equation: the d'Alembert equation. This analogy between propagation of sound and that of a massless scalar field in a Lorentzian metric also applies to non-homogeneous flows. In these cases, sound waves effectively propagate in a curved four-dimensional ''acoustic'' metric whose properties are determined by the flow. Using this analogy, we consider regular flows which become supersonic, and show that the acoustic metric behaves like that of a black hole. The analog…
