Experimental Observation of Acceleration-Induced Thermality

Abstract

We examine the radiation emitted by high energy positrons channeled into silicon crystal samples. The positrons are modeled as semiclassical vector currents coupled to an Unruh-DeWitt detector to incorporate any local change in the energy of the positron. In the subsequent accelerated QED analysis, we discover a Larmor formula and power spectrum that are both thermalized by the acceleration. Thus, these systems explicitly exhibit thermalization of the detector energy gap at the celebrated Fulling-Davies-Unruh (FDU) temperature. Our derived power spectrum, with a nonzero energy gap, is then shown to have an excellent statistical agreement with high energy channeling experiments and also provides a method to directly measure the FDU temperature. We also investigate the Rindler horizon dynamics and confirm that the Bekenstein-Hawking area-entropy law is satisfied in these experiments. As such, we present the evidence for the first observation of acceleration-induced thermality in a non-analogue system.

33 pages and 2 figures. Supplementary material is also included. Accepted for publication at Phys. Rev. D

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• Measuring Unruh radiation from accelerated electrons
• Anti-Unruh effect in the thermal background
• Classical Larmor formula through the Unruh effect for uniformly accelerated electrons
• Thermal Larmor radiation
• Strong Noninertial Radiative Shifts in Atomic Spectra at Low Accelerations
• Upon the horizon's verge: Thermal particle creation between and approaching horizons
• Enhanced anti-Unruh effect by simulated light-matter interactions
• The end of spacetime
• Maximal acceleration in a Lorentz invariant non-commutative space-time
• $\kappa$-deformed power spectrum and modified Unruh temperature
• Analysis of the CERN-NA63 radiation reaction data set, assuming the Rindler bath is composed of microscopic black holes
• Diamonds in Klein geometry
• Orbital angular momentum spectrum and entanglement in a rotating accelerated reference frame
• Canonical Quantization of the U(1) Gauge Field in the right Rindler-wedge in the Rindler Coordinates
• Repeated measurements on non-replicable systems and their consequences for Unruh-DeWitt detectors
• Canonical Quantization of the U(1) Gauge Field in the Rindler Coordinates
• Gravitational radiation with kinetic recoil
• Local Short-Time Acceleration induced Spectral Line Broadening and Possible Implications in Cosmology