Acceleration radiation of an atom freely falling into a Kerr black hole and near-horizon conformal quantum mechanics

A. Azizi, H. E. Camblong, A. Chakraborty, C. R. Ordóñez, and M. O. Scully

Phys. Rev. D 104, 065006 – Published 8 September 2021

Abstract

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 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 exhibited by all fields in the background of generic black holes.

Received 18 November 2020
Revised 12 March 2021
Accepted 29 July 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.065006

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Quantum aspects of black holes Quantum fields in curved spacetime Quantum optics Unruh effect

Gravitation, Cosmology & AstrophysicsParticles & Fields

Authors & Affiliations

A. Azizi¹, H. E. Camblong ², A. Chakraborty ³, C. R. Ordóñez^3,4, and M. O. Scully^1,5,6

¹Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA
²Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94117-1080, USA
³Department of Physics, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77024-5005, USA
⁴Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, MS 61, 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005, USA
⁵Baylor University, Waco, Texas 76706, USA
⁶Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA