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arXiv:2607.18805

Simulating Majorana fermions in black hole with Ising Models

John Vienn A. Estremadura, Kristian Hauser A. Villegas

quant-phgr-qcSubmitted Jul 21, 2026• Announced Jul 22, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime has led to profound predictions, including the Unruh effect and Hawking radiation, yet their direct observation remains extraordinarily challenging because of their extremely weak signatures. Here, we show that the transverse-field Ising model provides a quantum simulator for Majorana fermions in a Schwarzschild black hole background. Remarkably, different coordinate representations of the same spacetime-Schwarzschild, tortoise, Kruskal, and conformally flat-map onto distinct microscopic Ising spin models. Despite their microscopic differences, these models converge in the continuum limit to the same Majorana field theory, exhibiting an emergent form of general covariance. This provides a rare example of a fundamental symmetry of general relativity arising as an emergent property of a condensed matter system. We further demonstrate how black hole particle production can be simulated and detected through spin correlation measurements, and discuss experimental platforms capable of realizing these models. Our work establishes a practical route for investigating fermionic QFT in curved spacetime using controllable quantum many-body systems and tabletop experiments.

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Quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime has led to profound predictions, including the Unruh effect and Hawking radiation, yet their direct observation remains extraordinarily challenging because of their extremely weak signatures. Here, we show that the transverse-field Ising model provides a quantum simulator for Majorana fermions in a Schwarzschild black hole background. Remarkably, different coordinate representations of the same spacetime-Schwarzschild, tortoise, Kruskal, and conformally flat-map onto distinct microscopic Ising spin models. Despite their microscopic differences, these models converge in the continuum limit to the same Majorana field theory, exhibiting an emergent form of general covariance. This provides a rare example of a fundamental symmetry of general relativity arising as an emergent property of a condensed matter system. We further demonstrate how black hole particle production can be simulated and detected through spin correlation measurements, and discuss experimental platforms capable of realizing these models. Our work establishes a practical route for investigating fermionic QFT in curved spacetime using controllable quantum many-body systems and tabletop experiments.
We demonstrate that a quantum field theory (QFT) in general two-dimensional curved spacetimes can be realized by a system of quantum spins or qubits. We consider a spin-1/2 model on a one-dimensional ring with spatially and temporally varying exchange couplings and magnetic fields. This model reduces to a QFT of Majorana fermions in the continuum limit. From this correspondence, we establish a dictionary for translating between the spacetime-dependent parameters of the spin model and the general metric on which the QFT is defined. After addressing the general case, we consider the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) metric as a simple example. According to the dictionary, the QFT of Majorana fermions on the FLRW metric corresponds to the Ising model with a time-dependent transverse magnetic field. We demonstrate that the production of Majorana particles in the expanding universe can be simulated with the transverse-field Ising model by increasing the strength of the magnetic field. Furthermore, we examine the Unruh effect through the spin system by using our prescription and show the direct relation between the entanglement (or modular) Hamiltonian in the spin system and the Rindler Hamiltonian. This approach provides an experimentally viable system for probing various phenomena in QFT within curved spacetime, while also opening the door to uncovering nontrivial phenomena in spin systems inspired by curved spacetime physics. It offers fresh perspectives on both QFT in curved spacetimes and quantum many-body spin systems, revealing profound connections between these fields.
Many quantum lattice models have an emergent relativistic description in their continuum limit. The celebrated example is graphene, whose continuum limit is described by the Dirac equation on a Minkowski spacetime. Not only does the continuum limit provide us with a dictionary of geometric observables to describe the models with, but it also allows one to solve models that were otherwise analytically intractable. In this thesis, we investigate novel features of this relativistic description for a range of quantum lattice models. In particular, we demonstrate how to generate emergent curved spacetimes and identify observables at the lattice level which reveal this emergent behaviour, allowing one to simulate relativistic effects in the laboratory. We first study carbon nanotubes, a system with an edge, which allows us to test the interesting feature of the Dirac equation that it allows for bulk states with support on the edges of the system. We then study Kitaev's honeycomb model which has a continuum limit describing Majorana spinors on a Minkowski spacetime. We show how to generate a non-trivial metric in the continuum limit of this model and how to observe the effects of this metric and its corresponding curvature in the lattice observables, such as Majorana correlators, Majorana zero modes and the spin densities. We also discuss how lattice defects and Z2\mathbb{Z}_2Z2​ gauge fields at the lattice level can generate chiral gauge fields in the continuum limit and we reveal their adiabatic equivalence. Finally, we discuss a chiral modification of the 1D XY model which makes the model interacting and introduces a non-trivial phase diagram. We see that this generates a black hole metric in the continuum limit, where the inside and outside of the black hole are in different phases. We then demonstrate that by quenching this model we can simulate Hawking radiation.
We show that Hawking radiation spontaneously generated by dynamical black-hole formation can be realized in a local quantum spin model. Starting from the ground state corresponding to the early-time vacuum, with no initially prepared excitations, we follow the dynamics induced by the evolving geometry. In the corresponding continuum quantum field theory, Hawking particle creation is associated with nontrivial Bogoliubov mixing between the in- and out-mode decompositions. We derive the resulting renormalized local energy density in the continuum quantum field theory, which corresponds to an energy-weighted integral of the Hawking spectrum, and identify its counterpart as a local spin observable whose expectation value quantitatively reproduces the continuum prediction, including its dependence on the surface gravity. The agreement persists over a finite time window whose duration grows logarithmically with system size, revealing the crossover from universal continuum Hawking physics to lattice-cutoff dynamics. These results establish a microscopic route to quantum simulation of quantum field theory in curved spacetime, connecting field-theoretic particle creation directly to experimentally accessible many-body observables.
We numerically compute renormalized expectation values of quadratic operators in a quantum field theory (QFT) of free Dirac fermions in curved two-dimensional (Lorentzian) spacetime. First, we use a staggered-fermion discretization to generate a sequence of lattice theories yielding the desired QFT in the continuum limit. Numerically-computed lattice correlators are then used to approximate, through extrapolation, those in the continuum. Finally, we use so-called point-splitting regularization and Hadamard renormalization to remove divergences, and thus obtain finite, renormalized expectation values of quadratic operators in the continuum. As illustrative applications, we show how to recover the Unruh effect in flat spacetime and how to compute renormalized expectation values in the Hawking-Hartle vacuum of a Schwarzschild black hole and in the Bunch-Davies vacuum of an expanding universe described by de Sitter spacetime. Although here we address a non-interacting QFT using free fermion techniques, the framework described in this paper lays the groundwork for a series of subsequent studies involving simulation of interacting QFTs in curved spacetime by tensor network techniques.
We develop a framework to simulate quantum field theories (QFTs) with boundaries in (1+1)(1+1)(1+1)-dimenmsional curved spacetimes by employing open spin systems. Building upon our previous work that established a mapping from spin systems to QFTs in periodic geometries, we extend the correspondence to systems with boundaries, where boundary conditions play a crucial role in shaping the dynamics. Focusing on Majorana fermions, we derive the allowed boundary conditions from the requirement of inner product conservation and formulate their realization in spin systems. The corresponding spin model is shown to reproduce boundary conditions of QFT accurately when a free function in the spin model is appropriately chosen. As an explicit demonstration, we analyze a flat spacetime example, comparing spectra, mode functions, and linear responses between the continuum and lattice descriptions. Our findings confirm that open spin systems can successfully replicate QFT dynamics with boundaries.