Tunnelling amplitudes and Hawking radiation from worldline QFT

Abstract

We compare Hawking radiation in a collapse background with Schwinger pair creation in an electric field. The comparison is driven by the presence of an analogue horizon in the Schwinger case, which causally divides spacetime for classical particles, but through which quantum fields can tunnel. Amplitudes for tunnelling processes are encoded in the asymptotic behaviour of solutions to the appropriate background-coupled wave equation. We construct these solutions, in both gravity and QED, using the worldline approach, where tunnelling and particle creation manifest as complex saddle points of a real-time path integral. For the Schwinger effect, these saddles correspond to complex worldlines, while for Hawking radiation, the corresponding worldlines are real, but appear complex when extended beyond a certain coordinate patch.