Exploring Event Horizons and Hawking Radiation through Deformed Graphene Membranes

Analogue gravitational systems are becoming an increasing popular way of studying the behaviour of quantum systems in curved spacetime. Setups based on ultracold quantum gases in particular, have been recently harnessed to explore the thermal nature of Hawking's and Unruh's radiation that was theoretically predicted almost 50 years ago. For solid state implementations, a promising system is graphene, in which a link between the Dirac-like low-energy electronic excitations and relativistic quantum field theories has been unveiled soon after its discovery. This link could be extended to the case of curved quantum field theory when the graphene sheet is shaped in a surface of constant negative curvature, known as Beltrami's pseudosphere. Here we provide numerical evidence that energetically stable negative curvature graphene surfaces can be realized. Owing to large-scale simulations, our geometrical realizations are characterized by a ratio between the carbon–carbon bond length and the pseudosphere radius small enough to allow the formation of an analog of a black hole event horizon. Additionally, from the energy dependence of the spatially resolved density of states, we infer some thermal properties of the corresponding gravitational system, which could be investigated using low temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy or optical near field spectroscopy. These findings pave the way to the realization of a solid-state system in which the curved spacetime dynamics of quantum many body systems can be investigated.