Derivation of Hawking radiation in dispersive dielectric media

Abstract

Motivated by recent experimental efforts, we study a black hole analog induced by the propagation of a strong laser pulse in a nonlinear dielectric medium. Based on the Hopfield model (one pair of Sellmeier coefficients), we perform an analytic and fully relativistic microscopic derivation of the analog of Hawking radiation in this setup. The Hawking temperature is determined by the analog of the surface gravity (as expected), but we also find a frequency-dependent gray-body factor (i.e., a nonthermal spectrum at infinity) due to the breaking of conformal invariance in this setup.