Effective spacetime and Hawking radiation from a moving domain wall in a thin film of 3He-A

An event horizon for "relativistic" fermionic quasiparticles can be constructed in a thin film of superfluid He-3-A. The quasiparticles see an effective "gravitational" field which is induced by a topological soliton of the order parameter. Within the soliton the "speed of light" crosses zero and changes sign. When the soliton moves, two planar event horizons (black hole and white hole) appear, with a curvature singularity between them. Aside from the singularity, the effective spacetime is incomplete at future and past boundaries, but the quasiparticles cannot escape there because the nonrelativistic corrections become important as the blueshift grows, yielding "superluminal" trajectories. The question of Hawking radiation from the moving soliton is discussed but not resolved. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-3640(98)01023- 8].