Can a closed critical surface in a quark-gluon plasma serve as a model for the behavior of quantum gravity near to an event horizon?

TL;DR

This paper explores how a closed critical surface in quark-gluon plasma could model quantum gravity phenomena near event horizons, highlighting potential laboratory observations of quantum critical behavior affecting hydrodynamics.

Contribution

It proposes that certain quantum fluids' critical surfaces can mimic black hole horizons, linking quantum criticality with gravitational physics in laboratory conditions.

Findings

Critical surfaces have temperature proportional to inverse radius.

Entropy near the critical surface approaches the Bekenstein bound.

Hydrodynamics may break down near the critical point, modeling quantum gravity effects.

Abstract

Time stands still at a quantum critical point in the sense that correlation functions near to the critical point are approximately independent of frequency. In the case of a quantum liquid this would imply that classical hydrodynamics breaks down near to the critical point, revealing the underlying quantum degrees of freedom. An opportunity to see this effect for the first time in the laboratory may be provided by relativistic heavy ion collisions that are tuned so that the quark-gluon plasma passes through its critical point forming a closed critical surface. In this note we point out that in certain kinds of quantum fluids the temperature of a spherical critical surface will be proportional to (radius)-1 and the entropy inside the surface will be close to the Bekenstein bound. In these cases the breakdown in hydrodynamics near to the critical point might serve as a model for the behavior of quantum gravity near to an event horizon. Such a possibility is a fortiori notable because general relativity predicts that nothing should happen at an event horizon.