Analogues of gravity-induced instabilities in anisotropic metamaterials

Abstract

In the context of field theory in curved spacetimes, it is known that suitable background spacetime geometries can trigger instabilities of fields, leading to exponential growth of their (quantum and classical) fluctuations -a phenomenon called vacuum awakening in the quantum context, which in some classical scenarios seeds spontaneous scalarization/vectorization. Despite its conceptual interest, an actual observation in nature of this effect is uncertain since it depends on the existence of fields with appropriate masses and couplings in strong-gravity regimes. Here, we propose analogues for this gravity-induced instability based on nonlinear optics of metamaterials which could, in principle, be observed in laboratory. * Electronic address: caiocesarribeiro@ifsc.usp.br † Electronic address: vanzella@ifsc.usp.br

Aspects of active quantum vacua: analogue models and quantization in dispersive media

“…The first one is dedicated to the characterization of the proposed analogue models. It consists of a bona fide adaptation of results that are already published, 32 and thus it follows closely the structure of submitted work. The second one deals with field quantization in active dispersive media.…”

“…Here, J i is the single-plate reflexion coefficient for the TM modes, 32) and K i = 1 − J i the transmission coefficient. As for the solutions originating at z = ∞, we find that…”