this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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inspired by https://lemmy.world/post/39777765

Unruh effect should work for any acceleration, including centripetal acceleration of a James Bond-style killer centrifuge/amusement ride. The "thermal bath" experienced by such an observer is composed mainly of photons, but also some elementary particles, in proportion to quantum field coupling strengths or something, coming in as a "particle shower" from the direction of the Rindler event horizon - namely down. The accelerated observer can capture these particles for use later. Did I get it all correct?

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[โ€“] porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Routine maybe, I don't think it's that boring

[โ€“] TauZero@mander.xyz 10 points 4 days ago

Oh for sure, science is never boring :D but compare the intense situation in the troll science pic to the displayable results from the actual experiment (fig. 1c):

Tip: evidence for the Unruh effect you are looking for is this 2mm difference right here:

The teal dashed line is the power spectrum predicted from theory including the Unruh effect, and violet dashed line is without it. The data points match the teal line better. But you can't even see that by eye from the noisy dots! You need to do chi-square statistics to even prove it. (The dots below 30GeV - outside the "accelerated thermality" region - are not included in the analysis because they are guaranteed to be incorrect, as the experiment wasn't sensitive in that range.) Boooring!

What the authors of the paper glance over in a single sentence before moving on to better things is that they had to shoot a FRICKING POSITRON DEATH BEAM FROM THE MFKING LHC through a crystal target and watch the resulting Bremsstrahlung gamma rays that would melt your bones off to obtain these datapoints. Talk about intense!