Tunnelling amplitudes and Hawking radiation from worldline QFT

2025/08/01 by Anton Ilderton, Ilderton, Anton, Karthik Rajeev +1 · 9 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Amplitude #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Hawking #Hawking radiation #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Horizon #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Path integral formulation #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum field theory in curved spacetime #Quantum tunnelling #Saddle #Spacetime

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.00997

published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)

openalex publication_date 2025/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

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.

Citations

• Worldline instantons for nonperturbative particle production by space and time dependent gravitational fields
• Analytic Properties of Infrared-Finite Amplitudes in Theories with Long-Range Forces
• Schwinger pair production in spacetime fields: Moiré patterns, Aharonov-Bohm phases, and Sturm-Liouville eigenvalues
• Spinning bodies in general relativity from bosonic worldline oscillators
• Supertranslations from Scattering Amplitudes
• Post-Minkowskian Theory Meets the Spinning Effective-One-Body Approach for Bound-Orbit Waveforms
• All-multiplicity amplitudes in impulsive PP-waves from the worldline formalism
• An eikonal-inspired approach to the gravitational scattering waveform
• Tidal effects and renormalization at fourth post-Minkowskian order
• A de Sitter S-matrix for the masses
• Momentum spectrum of Schwinger pair production in four-dimensional e-dipole fields
• Dynamical Tidal Response of Kerr Black Holes from Scattering Amplitudes
• Scattering amplitudes and electromagnetic horizons
• Snowmass White Paper: the Double Copy and its Applications
• Snowmass White Paper: Gravitational Waves and Scattering Amplitudes
• The SAGEX Review on Scattering Amplitudes, Chapter 14: Classical Gravity from Scattering Amplitudes
• The SAGEX Review on Scattering Amplitudes, Chapter 2: An Invitation to Color-Kinematics Duality and the Double Copy
• Quantum mechanical path integrals in the first quantised approach to quantum field theory
• The Duality Between Color and Kinematics and its Applications
• One-loop quantum gravity from a worldline viewpoint
• Hawking Radiation of Charged Particles as Tunneling from Higher Dimensional Reissner-Nordstrom-de Sitter Black Holes
• A novel approach to particle production in an uniform electric field
• Hawking Radiation as Tunneling
• Black-hole evaporation in the Klein-Sauter-Heisenberg-Euler formalism
• Particle creation by black holes

Cited by

• Conformally-flat gravitational analogues to the Schwinger effect
• Optical appearance, Hawking radiation, and Barrow thermodynamics of Letelier black hole in electromagnetic universe
• Strong-field regime within effective field theory
• Heat Kernels and Resummations: the Spinor Case
• Hawking Radiation meets the Double Copy
• Quantum Effects for Black Holes with On-Shell Amplitudes
• Worldline Formulations of Covariant Fracton Theories
• Worldline instantons for nonperturbative particle production by space and time dependent gravitational fields
• Computational quantum field theory for fermion pair creation in 2-dimensional curved spacetimes

Related

• Facets of Tunneling: Particle production in external fields
• Hawking-like radiation from the apparent horizon in an FRW Universe : Quantum Corrections
• Hawking radiation as tunnelling from the trapping horizon of a general non-static spherically symmetric space-time
• Decay of the cosmological constant by Hawking radiation as quantum tunneling
• Pathology in WKB wave function for tunneling assisted by gravity