IMSc Webinar

Hawking-Unruh effect, Inverted oscillator and quasi-normal decay in lowest Landau levels

Suraj Hegde

MPIPKS Dresden

In this talk I will describe how some of the quantum mechanical behaviour near an event horizon in relativistic spacetimes can be fully captured in a condensed matter setting of applied potentials on quantum Hall systems. Through symmetry arguments, I show that the behaviour of quantum mechanical modes near a black hole can be captured by the physics of an inverted Harmonic oscillator that is realized in the quantum Hall system. The equivalence of the Lorentz boosts to area preserving shear deformations in the lowest Landau level leads to similar time-evolution of modes in the two settings, ultimately leading to the physics of Hawking radiation. The same symmetry arguments also lead to new perspectives on some quantum Hall phenomena such as the Hall viscosity. The inverted harmonic oscillator also hosts decaying modes with quantised decay rates. I show how these could be accessed in a quantum Hall set up through wave-packet scattering. I will also give a pedagogical introduction to the Hawking radiation in black holes, geared towards condensed matter audience. The talk will be based on the following two works: Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 156802 (2019), arXiv:2012.09875 (2020).

Here is the link to the google meet:
meet.google.com/iez-tcrq-otu.