Signatures of the Unruh effect from electrons accelerated by ultrastrong laser fields

We calculate the radiation resulting from the Unruh effect for strongly accelerated electrons and show that the photons are created in pairs whose polarizations are perfectly correlated. Apart from the photon statistics, this quantum radiation can further be discriminated from the classical (Larmor)...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Physical review letters Vol. 97; no. 12; p. 121302
Main Authors:	Schützhold, Ralf, Schaller, Gernot, Habs, Dietrich
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States 22-09-2006
Subjects:	ANGULAR DISTRIBUTION CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSICS CORRECTIONS ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS ELECTRONS LASER RADIATION PHOTONS POLARIZATION QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS STATISTICS
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Summary:	We calculate the radiation resulting from the Unruh effect for strongly accelerated electrons and show that the photons are created in pairs whose polarizations are perfectly correlated. Apart from the photon statistics, this quantum radiation can further be discriminated from the classical (Larmor) radiation via the different spectral and angular distributions. The signatures of the Unruh effect become significant if the external electromagnetic field accelerating the electrons is not too far below the Schwinger limit and might be observable with future facilities. Finally, the corrections due to the birefringent nature of the QED vacuum at such ultrahigh fields are discussed.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0031-9007 1079-7114
DOI:	10.1103/physrevlett.97.121302