Anton Ilderton, William Lindved, Karthik Rajeev
Gravity and gauge theory are concretely linked by the double copy. Although well-studied at the level of perturbative scattering in vacuum, far less is known about nonperturbative aspects or extensions of double copy beyond trivial backgrounds. We show here how Hawking radiation in a collapse metric, its associated thermal spectrum, and horizon dependence, emerges from the double copy of particle production in a background gauge field, where there is no global horizon or thermal spectrum. Our approach combines worldline and amplitude methods, and allows the unification of several classical and quantum double copy prescriptions for black hole spacetimes.