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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1811.08555,
title = {Giant Unruh effect in hyperbolic metamaterial waveguides},
author = {I. I. Smolyaninov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.08555},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures, this version is accepted for publication in Optics Letters