2025/03/12 by Sara Kanzi, Kanzi, Sara, Daniel Hodgson +3
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2503.09863
11 pages, 5 figures, more discussion and more details added
arxiv created 2026/08/01 · arxiv updated 2026/08/04
The Unruh effect predicts that a uniformly accelerating observer will find themselves in a thermal bath of photons, where a resting observer would not see any. However, since Maxwell's equations hold everywhere, the observers cannot tell who is resting and who is accelerating by looking only at the electromagnetic field. The only difference between different reference frames is that they use different spacetime coordinates; otherwise the formalism for the description of light must be the same for all observers. To provide new insight into the validity of the Unruh effect, this paper generalises a recent physically-motivated quantisation of the electromagnetic field to different reference frames. Afterwards, we demonstrate that, in position space, an accelerating observer simply experiences a constantly changing Doppler effect, while all reference frames share a common vacuum.