Modified Unruh effect from generalized uncertainty principle.

Area of Science:

• Theoretical Physics
• Quantum Gravity
• Quantum Field Theory

Background:

• The Unruh effect predicts that an accelerating observer perceives a thermal bath of particles.
• Standard quantum mechanics assumes a fixed fundamental commutator, leading to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
• Investigating modifications to this principle could reveal new physics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compute corrections to the Unruh effect and Unruh temperature using a generalized uncertainty principle (GUP).
• To compare results from heuristic and standard field theoretic calculations of these corrections.
• To analyze the impact of GUP on the thermal properties of Unruh radiation.

Main Methods:

• Deformation of the canonical commutation relation by adding a momentum-squared term to define a GUP.
• Heuristic derivation of Unruh temperature corrections under the GUP.
• Standard quantum field theoretic calculation of Unruh temperature corrections under the GUP.
• Analysis of the dependence of temperature corrections on acceleration and frequency.

Main Results:

• The GUP leads to corrections in the Unruh temperature.
• Both heuristic and field theoretic approaches yield consistent first-order corrections in the deformation parameter.
• The thermal nature of Unruh radiation is recovered in the limit of small GUP deformations.
• Temperature corrections exhibit a cubic dependence on acceleration, consistent across both methods.

Conclusions:

• The generalized uncertainty principle offers a framework to study quantum gravity modifications to thermal quantum field phenomena like the Unruh effect.
• The consistency between different calculation methods supports the validity of the GUP corrections.
• Further investigation into GUP's implications for black hole thermodynamics and other quantum effects is warranted.