Once considered practically unseeable, a phenomenon called the Unruh effect might soon be revealed in laboratory experiments
Theoretical physics is full of weird and wonderful concepts: wormholes, quantum foam and multiverses, just to name a few. The problem is that while such things easily emerge from theorists’ equations, they are practically impossible to create and test in a laboratory setting. But for one such “untestable” theory, an experimental setup might be just on the horizon.
Where it comes from has to do with the fact that so-called empty space is not exactly empty at all but rather suffused by overlapping energetic quantum fields. Fluctuations in these fields can give rise to photons, electrons, and other particles and can be sparked by an accelerating body. In essence, an object speeding through a field-soaked vacuum picks up a fraction of the fields’ energy, which is subsequently reemitted as Unruh radiation.
A year later Davies met Unruh at a conference where Unruh was giving a lecture about his recent breakthrough. Davies was surprised to hear Unruh describe a very similar phenomenon to what had emerged from his own dressing-table calculations. “And so we got together in the bar afterward,” Davies recalls. The two quickly struck up a collaboration that continued for several years.
Essentially, the Unruh effect is the flip side of a far more famous physics phenomenon: Hawking radiation, named for the physicist Stephen Hawking, who theorized that an almost imperceptible halo of light should leak from black holes as they slowly evaporate. The same holds true, he says, from a math perspective. “It’s as simple as that: there is an equivalence between gravity and acceleration,” Sudhir adds.
Unfortunately, an energy-boosting photon bath also adds background “noise” by amplifying other quantum-field effects in the vacuum. “That’s exactly what we don’t want to happen,” Sudhir says. But by carefully controlling the trajectory of the electron, the experimenters should be able to nullify this potential interference—a process that Sudhir likens to throwing an invisibility cloak over the particle.
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