Hawking Radiation and Classical Tunneling: a Numerical Study

Unruh [1] demonstrated that black holes have an analogy in acoustics. Under this analogy the acoustic event horizon is defined by the set of points in which the local background flow exceeds the local sound speed. In past work [2], we demonstrated that under a white noise source, the acoustic event horizon will radiate at a thermal spectrum via a classical tunneling process. In this work, I summarize the theory presented in [2] and nondimensionalize it in order to reduce the dynamical equations to one parameter, the coupling coefficient η. Since η is the sole parameter of the system, we are able to vary it in a numerical study of the dependence of the transmission coefficient on η. This numerical work leads to the same functional dependence of the transmission coefficient on η as predicted in [2].