Analogues of gravity-induced instabilities in anisotropic metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper proposes laboratory analogues of gravity-induced instabilities using nonlinear optical metamaterials, enabling potential experimental observation of phenomena similar to vacuum awakening and spontaneous scalarization in curved spacetime.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to simulate gravity-induced field instabilities using anisotropic metamaterials in nonlinear optics.

Findings

Analogues of vacuum awakening demonstrated in metamaterials

Potential for laboratory observation of gravity-like instabilities

Framework for studying field instabilities in controlled settings

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 $\textit{vacuum awakening}$ in the quantum context, which in some classical scenarios seeds $\textit{spontaneous scalarization/vectorization}$. 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.