Emission of correlated photon pairs from superluminal perturbations in dispersive media

Abstract

We develop a perturbative theory that describes a superluminal refractive perturbation propagating in a dispersive medium and the subsequent excitation of the quantum vacuum zero-point fluctuations. We find a process similar to the anomalous Doppler effect: photons are emitted in correlated pairs and mainly within a Cerenkov-like cone, one on the forward and the other in backward directions. The number of photon pairs emitted from the perturbation increases strongly with the degree of superluminality and under realizable experimental conditions, it can reach up to ~0.01 photons per pulse. Moreover, it is in principle possible to engineer the host medium so as to modify the effective group refractive index. In the presence of "fast light" media, e.g. a with group index smaller than unity, a further ~10x enhancement may be achieved and the photon emission spectrum is characterized by two sharp peaks that, in future experiments would clearly identify the correlated emission of photon pairs.

9 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Fiber-optical analogue of the event horizon
• Hawking radiation from ultrashort laser pulse filaments
• Electromagnetic energy-momentum in dispersive media

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Two photon emission from superluminal and accelerating index perturbations
• Perturbative photon production in a dispersive medium
• Kinematic study of the effect of dispersion in quantum vacuum emission from strong laser pulses
• Dynamical Casimir effect for semitransparent mirrors
• Studies on particle creation during the universe expansion with a laser system