Search results for "field theory in curved space"
showing 10 items of 32 documents
Reply to "Comment on 'Insensitivity of Hawking radiation to an invariant Planck-scale cutoff' "
2010
We clarify the relationship between the conclusions of the previous Comment of A. Helfer and that of our Brief Report.
Nonlocal density correlations as a signature of Hawking radiation from acoustic black holes
2008
We have used the analogy between gravitational systems and nonhomogeneous fluid flows to calculate the density-density correlation function of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of an acoustic black hole. The emission of correlated pairs of phonons by Hawking-like process results into a peculiar long-range density correlation. Quantitative estimations of the effect are provided for realistic experimental configurations.
Adiabatic regularization for spin-1/2 fields
2013
We extend the adiabatic regularization method to spin-1/2 fields. The ansatz for the adiabatic expansion for fermionic modes differs significantly from the WKB-type template that works for scalar modes. We give explicit expressions for the first adiabatic orders and analyze particle creation in de Sitter spacetime. As for scalar fields, the adiabatic method can be distinguished by its capability to overcome the UV divergences of the particle number operator. We also test the consistency of the extended method by working out the conformal and axial anomalies for a Dirac field in a Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker spacetime, in exact agreement with those obtained from other renormalization…
Short-distance contribution to the spectrum of Hawking radiation
2006
The Hawking effect can be rederived in terms of two-point functions and in such a way that it makes it possible to estimate, within the conventional semiclassical theory, the contribution of ultrashort distances to the Planckian spectrum. For Schwarzschild black holes of three solar masses the analysis shows that Hawking radiation is very robust up to frequencies of 96 T_H or 270 T_H for bosons and fermions, respectively. For primordial black holes (with masses around 10^{15} g) these frequencies turn out to be of order 52T_H and 142 T_H. Only at these frequencies and above do we find that the contribution of Planck distances is of order of the total spectrum itself. Below this scale, the c…
Equivalence of Adiabatic and DeWitt-Schwinger renormalization schemes
2014
We prove that adiabatic regularization and DeWitt-Schwinger point-splitting provide the same result for the renormalized expectation values of the stress-energy tensor for spin-$1/2$ fields. This generalizes the equivalence found for scalar fields, which is here recovered in a different way. We also argue that the coincidence limit of the DeWitt-Schwinger proper time expansion of the two-point function exactly agrees with the analogous expansion defined by the adiabatic regularization method at any order (for both scalar and spin-$1/2$ fields). We also illustrate the power of the adiabatic method to compute higher order DeWitt coefficients in FLRW universes.
Particle creation by wormholes: A 1 + 1 model
2020
The propagation of a free massless scalar field in a [Formula: see text]-dimensional Minkowski space modeling, a wormhole is considered. The wormhole model consists on two timelike trajectories, which represent the entrance and the exit of the wormhole, connected via some transfer function that specifies how incoming modes that reach the entrance are transferred to the exit. We find that particles and energy fluxes are generically produced except for transfer functions that represent global conformal transformations. We consider several examples involving exit trajectories which are asymptotically inertial, asymptotically null, and also involving a faster-than-light motion to illustrate th…
Vacuum polarization around stars: Nonlocal approximation
2004
We compute the vacuum polarization associated with quantum massless fields around stars with spherical symmetry. The nonlocal contribution to the vacuum polarization is dominant in the weak field limit, and induces quantum corrections to the exterior metric that depend on the inner structure of the star. It also violates the null energy conditions. We argue that similar results also hold in the low energy limit of quantum gravity. Previous calculations of the vacuum polarization in spherically symmetric spacetimes, based on local approximations, are not adequate for newtonian stars.
Insensitivity of Hawking radiation to an invariant Planck-scale cutoff
2009
A disturbing aspect of Hawking's derivation of black hole radiance is the need to invoke extreme conditions for the quantum field that originates the emitted quanta. It is widely argued that the derivation requires the validity of the conventional relativistic field theory to arbitrarily high, trans-Planckian scales. We stress in this note that this is not necessarily the case if the question is presented in a covariant way. We point out that Hawking radiation is immediately robust against an invariant Planck-scale cutoff. This important feature of Hawking radiation is relevant for a quantum gravity theory that preserves, in some way, the Lorentz symmetry.
Particles and energy fluxes from a conformal field theory perspective
2004
We analyze the creation of particles in two dimensions under the action of conformal transformations. We focus our attention on Mobius transformations and compare the usual approach, based on the Bogoliubov coefficients, with an alternative but equivalent viewpoint based on correlation functions. In the latter approach the absence of particle production under full Mobius transformations is manifest. Moreover, we give examples, using the moving-mirror analogy, to illustrate the close relation between the production of quanta and energy.
Asymptotic Safety in Quantum Einstein Gravity: Nonperturbative Renormalizability and Fractal Spacetime Structure
2007
The asymptotic safety scenario of Quantum Einstein Gravity, the quantum field theory of the spacetime metric, is reviewed and it is argued that the theory is likely to be nonperturbatively renormalizable. It is also shown that asymptotic safety implies that spacetime is a fractal in general, with a fractal dimension of 2 on sub-Planckian length scales.