Abstract
In 1974, Hawking showed1,2 that black holes evaporate by the emission of low-temperature thermal radiation, now named Hawking radiation. Shortly thereafter a closely related effect called Unruh radiation became apparent. According to Unruh3 and Davies,4 observers of the electromagnetic field in an accelerating reference frame should see thermal radiation at a temperature T: where a is the acceleration relative to an inertial frame, c is the speed of light, and ħ and k are Planck's and Boltzmann’s constant, respectively. With an acceleration equivalent to that at the earth’s surface, g = 980 cm/s2, this thermal radiation is at a temperature of only 4 × 10−20 K. Bell has suggested5 that the spin depolarization of electrons accelerating around a storage ring may be interpreted as being caused by such radiation. Boyer6 introduced a physically helpful semiclassical interpretation of Unruh radiation. In his phenomenological picture, external zero point electro-magnetic field fluctuations are accelerated up to a nonzero temperature. The observer need not experience the acceleration directly. Davies and Fulling7 argued that the observation of reflected zero point field fluctuations from an accelerating mirror was sufficient to establish the relative accelerating motion.
© 1988 Optical Society of America
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