Black holes and other compact objects have gravitational fields strong enough to pull particle and antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum and cause objects to break apart.
Strong Gravitational Fields of Black Holes
Particle and antiparticle pairs arise spontaneously from quantum fluctuations penetrating empty space. These couples typically disappear so quickly that their existence is purely hypothetical. However, a strong field has the ability to separate members of a couple long enough for their existence to become tangible. Julian Schwinger determined the strength of the electric field required to form electron-positron pairs in 1951. Now, Michael Wondrak of Radboud University in the Netherlands and colleagues have suggested that strong gravitational tidal forces surrounding a black hole can create particle pairs.
All possible routes that a pair of virtual particles might take during their brief existence were considered by Wondrak and his colleagues. If the vacuum is stable, all newly formed pairs are destroyed. But a strong field destabilizes the vacuum, increasing the probability of some paths and reducing the number of recombining pairs. A clear outflow of real particles equalizes the gap, and in the case of a black hole's gravitational field this results in the black hole's eventual disintegration.
The generality of the theory allows it to replicate both Stephen Hawking's 1974 prediction that in a particle-antiparticle pair that spontaneously arose near the event horizon of a black hole, one particle could fall while the other could escape, and Schwinger's effect. The researchers also discovered that the Hawking effect is a specific example of a broader phenomenon. The ability of a curved gravitational field to stretch space-time is all it takes to create virtual particles; An event horizon is not necessary as Hawking first suggested. An intriguing result is that pairs of particles can be produced and decayed in neutron stars with Schwarzschild radii smaller than that of stars.
Source: Physics – Another Way for Black Holes to Evaporate (aps.org)
📩 05/06/2023 14:13