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A team of physicists say they did They discovered two properties of accelerating matter that they believe can make an unprecedented kind of radiation visible. just explained These properties mean that radiation monitoring – the so-called Unruh effect – can occur in tabletop laboratory experiments.
The Unruh effect in nature theoretically requires an unreasonable amount of acceleration to seeand because it is only visible from the perspective of an object accelerating in a vacuum, it is essentially impossible to see. But thanks to recent advances, it is possible to watch the Unruh effect in laboratory experiments.
In the new research, the team of scientists described two previously unknown aspects of the quantum field that could mean that the Unruh effect could be directly observed. The first is that the effects can be amplified, which means that normally weak effects can be tempted to become more prominent under certain conditions. The second phenomenon is that sufficiently accelerated atoms can become transparent. Team research is published This spring in the physical review letter.
The Unruh effect (or Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect, so named for the physicist who first proposed its existence in the 1970s) is a phenomenon predicted by quantum field theory, which states that an entity (whether a particle or a spacecraft) accelerates in space. void will Shine – even though the light will notseenOf Nor does any external observer accelerate in a vacuum.
“The meaning of acceleration-induced transparency is to make the Unruh Effect detector transparent to daily shifts, due to the nature of its motion,” Barbara Chuda, a physicist at the University of Waterloo and lead author of the study, said in a video call. with Gizmodo. Just as Hawking radiation is emitted by a black hole while its gravity attracts particles, the Unro effect is emitted by objects as they accelerate through space.
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There are several reasons why the Unruh effect has not been observed directly. First, the effect requires an absurd amount of linear acceleration; To reach a temperature of 1 K, at which an accelerated observer sees light, the observer It must be acceleratedGV 100 trillion meters per square second. Thermal Unruh Effect of Light; If the object is accelerated faster, the temperature of light It will be warmer.
The previous method of observing the effect of Unruh recommended. but this The team believe they have an interesting opportunity to observe the effect, thanks to their findings About the properties of quantum fields.
“We wanted to build a custom experiment that could clearly reveal the Unruh effect, and then provide a platform for studying the relevant aspects,” said Viveshek Sudhir, a physicist at MIT and co-author of the latest work. “Definitely is the key characteristic here: in particle accelerators, it’s really groups of particles that are accelerated, which means inferring very precise Unruh effects from the medium from the various interactions between particles within a group becomes very difficult.”
Sudhir concludes: “In a sense, we need to make more accurate measurements of the well-defined properties of single-accelerating particles, which is not what particle accelerators are made of.”
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The essence of their proposed experiment is to induce the Unruh effect in a laboratory setting, using atoms as detectors for the Unruh effect. By exploding one atom with a photon, the team would elevate the particle to a higher energy level, and its transparency caused by the acceleration would dampen the particle into the everyday noise that would disrupt the existence of the Unruh effect.
By inducing the particles with a laser, Oda says, “you increase the likelihood of seeing the Unruh effect, and it will likely increase with the number of photons in the field.” “And that number can be quite large, depending on how powerful your laser is.” In other words, because researchers can attack with particles quadrillion shotons, they increase the probability of the Unruh effect by 15 times.
Because the Unruh effect is similar to Hawking radiation in many respects, the researchers believe that the two properties of the quantum field they have recently described could be used to generate Hawking radiation and imply gravitational transparency. Since Hawking radiation has never been observed, the removal of the Unruh effect gas may be a step towards that Better understanding of theoretical radiance around black holes.
Of course, these results don’t mean much if the Unruh effect cannot be observed directly in the laboratory – the researchers’ next step. exactly when These experiments will be carried out, however, remains to be seen.
MORE: Black Hole Lab Shows Stephen Hawking Was Right, Obviously
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