Giant Unruh effect in hyperbolic metamaterial waveguides

Abstract

The Unruh effect is the prediction that an accelerating object perceives its surroundings as a bath of thermal radiation even if it accelerates in vacuum. The Unruh effect is believed to be very difficult to observe in the experiment, since an observer accelerating at g=9.8 m/s2 should see vacuum temperature of only 4x10^-20 K. Here we demonstrate that photons in metamaterial waveguides may behave as massive quasi-particles accelerating at up to 10^24 g, which is about twelve orders of magnitude larger than the surface acceleration near a stellar black hole. These record high accelerations may enable experimental studies of the Unruh effect and the loss of quantum entanglement in strongly accelerated reference frames.

4 pages, 3 figures, this version is accepted for publication in Optics Letters

References in corpus (4)

• Optical Hyperlens: Far-field imaging beyond the diffraction limit
• Measuring Quantum Coherence with Entanglement
• Magnifying superlens in the visible frequency range
• Unruh effect in a waveguide

Cited by in corpus (5)

• q-generalized Tsallis thermostatistics in Unruh effect for mixed fields
• Observation of the acceleration of light in a tapered optical fiber
• Enhancement of Unruh effect in high-intensity laser fields using hyperbolic metamaterials
• Diamonds in Klein geometry
• Optical analog of particle production in gravitational fields