What did we learn from studying acoustic black holes ?

The study of acoustic black holes has been undertaken to provide new insights about the role of high frequencies in black hole evaporation. Because of the infinite gravitational redshift from the event horizon, Hawking quanta emerge from configurations which possessed ultra high (trans-Planckian) frequencies. Therefore Hawking radiation cannot be derived within the framework of a low energy effective theory; and in all derivations there are some assumptions concerning Planck scale physics. The analogy with condensed matter physics was thus introduced to see if the asymptotic properties of the Hawking phonons emitted by an acoustic black hole, namely stationarity and thermality, are sensitive to the high frequency physics which stems from the granular character of matter and which is governed by a non-linear dispersion relation. In 1995 Unruh showed that they are not sensitive in this respect, in spite of the fact that phonon propagation near the (acoustic) horizon drastically differs from that of photons. In 2000 the same analogy was used to establish the robustness of the spectrum of primordial density fluctuations in inflationary models. This analogy is currently stimulating research for experimenting Hawking radiation. Finally it could also be a useful guide for going beyond the semi-classical description of black hole evaporation.Comment: 6 pages, Proceedings of the ``Journees Relativistes'' Dublin, Sept. 200

Constructing QFT's wherein Lorentz Invariance is broken by dissipative effects in the UV

There has been a recent interest in considering Quantum Field Theories in which Lorentz Invariance is broken in the UV sector. However attention has been mostly limited to dispersive theories. In this work we provide the generalized settings for studying dissipation. Unitarity is preserved by coupling the original fields to additional (heavy) fields which induce the dissipation. Starting with Lagrangians breaking LI in the UV, we learn that dissipative effects unavoidably develop in the effective theory. We then covariantize these Lagrangians in order to address the trans-Planckian question of inflation and black hole physics. The peculiar properties of the additional fields inducing dissipation is revealed by the covariantization. The links with the phenomenological approach to Quantum Gravity and with some Brane World scenarios are also discussed.Comment: 31 pages, 1 Figure, Proceedings of the SISSA conference: ``From Quantum to Emergent Gravity'' june 2007, * Added comments and reference

Saturation of black hole lasers in Bose-Einstein condensates

To obtain the end-point evolution of the so-called black hole laser instability, we study the set of stationary solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for piecewise constant potentials which admit a homogeneous solution with a supersonic flow in the central region between two discontinuities. When the distance between them is larger than a critical value, we recover that the homogeneous solution is unstable, and we identify the lowest energy state. We show that it can be viewed as determining the saturated value of the first (node-less) complex frequency mode which drives the instability. We also classify the set of stationary solutions and establish their relation both with the set of complex frequency modes and with known soliton solutions. Finally, we adopt a procedure \`a la Pitaevski-Baym-Pethick to construct the effective functional which governs the transition from the homogeneous to non-homogeneous solutions.Comment: Final version 22 pages, 12 figures v2: added a note on unitarit

Quantum correlations in inflationary spectra and violation of Bell inequalities

In spite of the macroscopic character of the fluctuation amplitudes, we show that the standard inflationary distribution of primordial density fluctuations still exhibits inherently quantum mechanical correlations (which cannot be mimicked by any classical stochastic ensemble). To this end, we propose a Gedanken experiment for which certain Bell inequalities are violated. We also compute the effect of decoherence and show that the violation persists provided that the decoherence lies below a certain non-vanishing threshold. Moreover, there exists a higher threshold above which no violation of any Bell inequalities can occur, so that the corresponding distributions can be interpreted as stochastic ensembles of classical fluctuations.Comment: Proceedings of the conference "100 years in relativity", Sao Paulo, August 22-24. To appear in a special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Physics (BJP