More excitement across the horizon

Preciado-Rivas, María R.; Naeem, Manar; Mann, Robert B.; Louko, Jorma

Abstract

An Unruh-DeWitt detector falling radially into a four-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole, coupled linearly to a massless scalar field that has been prepared in the Hartle-Hawking or Unruh state, has recently been shown to exhibit a local extremum in its transition probability near the black hole horizon [K. K. Ng et al., New J. Phys. 24, 103018 (2022)]. We show that a similar phenomenon is present in the transition rate of an Unruh-DeWitt detector falling radially into a spinless Bañados-Teitelboim-Zanelli black hole, with the scalar field prepared in the Hartle-Hawking state. We give extensive numerical results as a function of the detector’s energy gap, the black hole’s mass, and the detector’s drop-off radius. Our results suggest that the effect is robust, motivating a search for a similar effect in other black hole spacetimes, and calling for an explanation of the physical origin of the effect.

Citation

Preciado-Rivas, M. R., Naeem, M., Mann, R. B., & Louko, J. (2024). More excitement across the horizon. Physical Review D, 110(2), Article 025002. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.110.025002

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 31, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Jul 9, 2024
• Publication Date: Jul 15, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jul 11, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 11, 2024
• Journal: Physical Review D
• Print ISSN: 2470-0010
• Electronic ISSN: 2470-0029
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 110
• Issue: 2
• Article Number: 025002
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.110.025002
• Keywords: Quantum fields in curved spacetime
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/37153374
• Publisher URL: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.110.025002