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 nonanalog system.

We report on the observation of thermal photons from an accelerated electron via examination of radiative beta decay of free neutrons measured by the RDK II collaboration. The emitted photon spectrum is shown to corroborate a thermal distribution consistent with the dynamical Casimir effect. Supported by a robust chi-squared statistic, we find the photons reside in a 1D Planck spectrum with a temperature predicted by the moving mirror model. Subject Indices: B50 (Electromagnetic processes and properties), D29 (Nuclear decays and radioactivities (including fission)), and E76 (Quantum field theory on curved space)

In this manuscript we examine an accelerated charged particle moving through an optical medium, and explore the emission of accelerated-Cherenkov radiation. The particle’s reaction to acceleration creates a low-frequency spectral cutoff in the Cherenkov emission that has a sharp resonance at the superluminal threshold. Moreover, the effect of recoil on the radiation is incorporated kinematically through the use of an Unruh-DeWitt detector by setting an energy gap, i.e. the change in electron energy, to the recoil energy of the emitted photon. The simultaneous presence of recoil and acceleration conspire to produce a localized resonance peak in the emission. These theoretical considerations could be used to construct high precision tests of radiation reaction using Cherenkov emission under acceleration.

In this paper we compute the temperature registered by an Unruh–DeWitt detector coupled to a Hadamard renormalizable quantum field in an arbitrary state, moving along an accelerated trajectory in a curved spacetime. For a massless and conformally invariant field, the generalized expression for the temperature is given by the quadratic sum of the 4-acceleration, Raychaudhuri scalar, and renormalized field polarization. We can further find a novel constraint on the renormalized quantum field polarization in relativistic systems that are in global thermal equilibrium.

In this manuscript we examine the Unruh-thermalized CERN-NA63 radiation reaction dataset from the point of view of a diphoton Rindler bath. Under the assumption that these Hawking-Unruh diphoton pairs are microscopic trans-Planckian black holes, we find the resultant heat capacity describes the measured energy spectrum and is thus a dual description of the dataset. Then, employing an $n$-dimensional Stefan-Boltzmann analysis, we find the power radiated by a black hole in the standard $3+1$ spacetime dimensions in complete agreement with the data. Finally, we utilize this power spectrum to directly measure Newton’s constant of gravitation.