Black hole analogs in two-dimensional flows with constant shear
Phys. Rev. D 114, 065029 – Published 29 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/4gg4-4hxm
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 analog surface gravity at the transcritical horizon. These results highlight the nontrivial role of rotational dynamics in analog gravity experiments.
