An analogue of Hawking radiation in the quantum Hall effect

The edge of a droplet of lowest Landau-level quantum Hall fluid provides a model for a 1 + 1 dimensional chiral Dirac fermion. We use this fact to construct an analogue model for a chiral fermion in a space-time geometry possessing an event horizon. We show that the analogue horizon emits particles and holes with a thermal spectrum. Each emitted quasiparticle is correlated with an opposite-energy partner on the other side of the horizon. Once we trace out these ‘unobservable’ partners, we are left with a thermal density matrix. For typical quantum Hall device parameters, the predicted ‘Hawking’ temperature is about 2 K.