Hawking tunneling and boomerang behaviour of massive particles with E < m

Abstract

Massive particles are radiated from black holes through the Hawking mechanism together with the more familiar radiation of massless particles. For E ≥ m, the emission rate is identical to the massless case. But E < m particles can also tunnel across the horizon. A study of the dispersion relation and wave packet simulations show that their classical trajectory is similar to that of a boomerang. The tunneling formalism is used to calculate the probability for detecting such E < m particles, for a Schwarzschild black hole of astrophysical size or in an analogue gravity experiment, as a function of the distance from the horizon and the energy of the particle.