Acoustic Hawking radiation as a tunnelling effect in Michel accretion

Abstract

Michel accretion becomes transonic at the saddle point of a dynamical system. An Eulerian perturbation on the steady inflow produces the metric of an acoustic black hole. As a high-frequency travelling wave the perturbation does not destabilize the steady inflow. Acoustic waves propagating outwards against the fluid inflow are blocked at the sonic barrier but can tunnel through it with an exponentially decaying amplitude. The Hawking temperature and the frequency of the Hawking phonons are enhanced by the spacetime geometry.