Paper detail

Hawking radiation for Dirac spinors on the RP^3 geon

We analyse the Hawking(-Unruh) effect for a massive Dirac spinor on the Z_2 quotient of Kruskal spacetime known as the RP^3 geon. There are two distinct Hartle-Hawking-like vacua, depending on the choice of the spin structure, and suitable measurements in the static region (which on its own has only one spin structure) distinguish these two vacua. However, both vacua appear thermal in the usual Hawking temperature to certain types of restricted operators, including operators with support in the asymptotic future (or past). Similar results hold in a family of topologically analogous flat spacetimes, where we show the two vacua to be distinguished also by the shear stresses in the zero-mass limit. As a by-product, we display the explicit Bogolubov transformation between the Rindler-basis and the Minkowski-basis for massive Dirac fermions in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime.