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P. Chen (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University)
The well-known Hawking radiation from the black holes relies on the existence of the event horizon. The detailed understanding of the nature of the event horizon is of fundamental importance in physics. It has been demonstrated that a similar radiation effect (by the name "acceleration radiation", or "Unruh radiation") should occur for a "particle detector" under uniform acceleration, where there also exists an event horizon viewed from the proper frame of the particle. As the nature of the event horizon is generic to both cases, it is proposed that the physics associated with the black hole event horizon can be simulated and studied in the laboratory setting via violent acceleration induced by intense lasers. The Unruh radiation power from an electron is derived and its angular-frequency spectrum characterized. We then compare these to the competing classical Larmor radiation background. An experiment is proposed, where, under reasonable assumption of laser parameters, the signal-to-noise ratio is shown to be favorable for the detection of the Unruh radiation.
* Work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00515.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: chen@slac.stanford.edu