Journal Club

Seminar Room

Friday 16th of June, 2023

Title: Hawking meets Casimir at the lab

Presented by: Javier Olmedo

Abstract: I will discuss how a free field in a flat space-time with moving boundaries can be used to study the Hawking effect. Concretely, I will show that after a finite period of acceleration of one of the boundaries, the end state of the field shows nearly thermal properties. Besides, I will discuss that this setting can be implemented experimentally with current technology, at least in principle. As a final remark, I will mention how this configuration could allow us to model a regular black hole geometry.

Title: Conformal anomaly and gravitational pair production

Presented by: Antonio Manso

Abstract: We argue that the rate density of particle pair production Γ in background fields in conformal field theories is determined by the conformal anomaly and related to anomalous trace of the energy- momentum tensor as Γ = (π/2)hT µµ i if the trace is positive (and Γ = 0 otherwise). This formula perfectly reproduces (presumably, non-Hawking) radiation generated by static gravitational fields is the absence of an event horizon via a new evaporation mechanism suggested recently. Our relation also correctly describes the one-loop Schwinger pair creation in massless (scalar and spinor) quantum electrodynamics. It also accurately points to the Savvidi instability of the gluonic vacuum towards the formation of the chromomagnetic condensate. Photon and neutrino pair production are also discussed.