Hawking radiation from the double copy

Abstract

Gravity and gauge theory are concretely linked by the double copy. Although well-studied at the level of perturbative scattering in vacuum, far less is known about non-perturbative aspects or extensions of the double copy beyond trivial backgrounds. We show here how Hawking radiation in a collapse metric, its associated thermal spectrum, and horizon-dependence, emerges from the double copy of particle production in a background gauge field, where there is no global horizon, nor a thermal spectrum. Our approach combines worldline and amplitudes methods, and allows the unification of several classical and quantum double copy prescriptions for black hole spacetimes.

V2: minor clarifications to text. To appear in PRL