Unruh acceleration radiation revisited

Abstract

When ground-state atoms are accelerated and the field with which they interact is in its normal vacuum state, the atoms detect Unruh radiation. We show that atoms falling into a black hole emit acceleration radiation which, under appropriate initial conditions (Boulware vacuum), has an energy spectrum which looks much like Hawking radiation. This analysis also provides insight into the Einstein principle of equivalence between acceleration and gravity. The Unruh temperature can also be obtained by using the Kubo–Martin–Schwinger (KMS) periodicity of the two-point thermal correlation function, for a system undergoing uniform acceleration; as with much of the material in this paper, this known result is obtained with a twist.