Black hole analogues in two-dimensional flows with constant shear
Abstract
We investigate the gravitational analogy for shallow water waves propagating on a unidirectional background flow with constant shear. Generalizing the standard irrotational treatment, we demonstrate that a transverse background vorticity is perfectly compatible with the existence of an effective curved spacetime for longitudinal surface waves. We extract the modified acoustic metric and show that the conformal factor, which governs wave scattering, becomes strongly dependent on the vorticity. Consequently, we find that the presence of background shear significantly suppresses the scattering of modes over an inhomogeneous bathymetry, while mildly modifying the analogue surface gravity at the transcritical horizon. These results highlight the nontrivial role of rotational dynamics in analogue gravity experiments.
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BibTeX
@article{biondi2026black,
title = {{Black hole analogues in two-dimensional flows with constant shear}},
author = {Alessia Biondi and Scott Robertson and Germain Rousseaux},
journal = {Physical Review D},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1103/4gg4-4hxm},
eprint = {2603.05557},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05534357v2},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Black hole analogues in two-dimensional flows with constant shear
AU - Alessia Biondi
AU - Scott Robertson
AU - Germain Rousseaux
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/29
JO - Physical Review D
DO - 10.1103/4gg4-4hxm
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05534357v2
AB - We investigate the gravitational analogy for shallow water waves propagating on a unidirectional background flow with constant shear. Generalizing the standard irrotational treatment, we demonstrate that a transverse background vorticity is perfectly compatible with the existence of an effective curved spacetime for longitudinal surface waves. We extract the modified acoustic metric and show that the conformal factor, which governs wave scattering, becomes strongly dependent on the vorticity. Consequently, we find that the presence of background shear significantly suppresses the scattering of modes over an inhomogeneous bathymetry, while mildly modifying the analogue surface gravity at the transcritical horizon. These results highlight the nontrivial role of rotational dynamics in analogue gravity experiments.
SN - 2470-0010
SN - 2470-0029
ER -