1999/01/01 by Ted Jacobson · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology #Cutoff #Dark energy #Effective field theory #Hawking #Hilbert space #Lattice (music) #Lorentz covariance #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum and Classical Electrodynamics #Quantum field theory #Redshift #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #cond-mat #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1143/ptps.136.1
published as Prog.Theor.Phys.Suppl.136:1-17,1999 · 18 pages, to appear in Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement, Proceedings of Yukawa International Seminar 1999; typos corrected
openalex publication_date 1999/01/01 · arxiv created 2000/02/16 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Trans-Planckian redshifts in cosmology and outside black holes may provide windows on a hypothetical short distance cutoff on the fundamental degrees of freedom. In cosmology, such a cutoff seems to require a growing Hilbert space, but for black holes, Unruh's sonic analogy has given rise to both field theoretic and lattice models demonstrating how such a cutoff in a fixed Hilbert space might be compatible with a low energy effective quantum field theory of the Hawking effect. In the lattice case, the outgoing modes arise via a Bloch oscillation from ingoing modes. A short distance cutoff on degrees of freedom is incompatible with local Lorentz invariance, but may nevertheless be compatible with general covariance if the preferred frame is defined non-locally by the cosmological background. Pursuing these ideas in a different direction, condensed matter analogs may eventually allow for laboratory observations of the Hawking effect. This paper introduces and gives a fairly complete but brief review of the work that has been done in these areas, and tries to point the way to some future directions.