Physics Colloquia: From Special to General Relativity with Unruh and Hawking

Abstract: General relativity as originally developed by Einstein is based on the union of geometry and gravity. Half a century later the union of general relativity and thermodynamics was found to yield surprising results such as Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy and Hawking radiation. 

In their seminal works, Hawking, Unruh and others showed how quantum effects in curved space yield a blend of thermodynamics, quantum field theory and gravity which continues to intrigue and stimulate. It has been shown [1] that virtual processes in which atoms jump to an excited state while emitting a photon is an alternative way to view Unruh acceleration radiation. The present work [2] is an extension of that logic by considering what happens when atoms fall into a black hole (BH) as shown in the following Figure. 

This problem also provides new insights into Einstein's equivalence principle. In general, the quantum optics - black hole physics interface is a rich source of problems [3].

[1] M. Scully, V. Kocharovsky, F. Capasso, PRL (2003).
[2] M. Scully, S. Fulling, A. Svidzinsky, et al., PNAS (2018).
[3] M. Scully, A. Svidzinsky and W. Unruh, Phys. Rev. Res. (2022).

Host: Mark Raizen