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arXiv · 2509.07386

Simulating Unruh Radiation in High-Intensity Laser-Electron Interactions for Near-Term Experimental Tests

Rafi Hessami·Haidar Al-Naseri·Monika Yadav·Maanas Hemanth Oruganti·Brian Naranjo·James Rosenzweig
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Abstract

The Unruh effect predicts that a uniformly accelerating observer perceives the vacuum as a thermal bath, yet direct observation remains elusive [1]. We simulate Unruh radiation in realistic high-intensity laser-electron collisions relevant to FACET-II and LUXE using fully three-dimensional Monte Carlo methods. In our model, Unruh emission is treated as scattering from a rest-frame thermal spectrum with Klein-Nishina cross sections, while nonlinear Compton radiation is computed across many harmonic orders with photon recoil. We map the laboratory-frame spectral-angular distributions and identify phase-space regions where the Unruh-to-Compton ratio is maximized. For current FACET-II-like parameters (a0 = 5), favorable windows for observing Unruh radiation occur at 200-400 microrad and 2-3 GeV, although the absolute signal is small. For future LUXE Phase-1 (a0 = 23.6), the ratio increases by more than two orders of magnitude, with optimal angles around 800 microrad and photon energies 2-6 GeV. Our results suggest that targeted off-axis, mid-energy selections can enhance sensitivity to Unruh-like signatures, motivating dedicated measurements and further theoretical scrutiny of the emission model at high field strengths.

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Rafi Hessami, Haidar Al-Naseri, Monika Yadav, Maanas Hemanth Oruganti, Brian Naranjo, James Rosenzweig. 2025-09-09. Simulating Unruh Radiation in High-Intensity Laser-Electron Interactions for Near-Term Experimental Tests. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07386

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