Giant Unruh effect in hyperbolic metamaterial waveguides

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 an experiment, since an observer accelerating at g=9.8  m/s should see a vacuum...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Optics letters 2019-05, Vol.44 (9), p.2224-2227
Main Author: Smolyaninov, Igor I
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acceleration
Black holes
Metamaterials
Photons
Quantum entanglement
Quantum mechanics
Thermal radiation
Waveguides
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Summary: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 an experiment, since an observer accelerating at g=9.8  m/s should see a vacuum temperature of only 4×10   K. Here we demonstrate that photons in metamaterial waveguides may behave as massive quasi-particles accelerating at up to 10   g, which is about 12 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.
ISSN:0146-9592
1539-4794
DOI:10.1364/OL.44.002224