# Experimental Observation of Acceleration-Induced Thermality

## TL;DR

This paper reports the first experimental evidence of acceleration-induced thermality by analyzing radiation from high-energy positrons in silicon, confirming theoretical predictions of the Unruh effect and related thermodynamic laws.

## Contribution

It provides the first direct experimental observation of acceleration-induced thermality in a non-analogue system, linking high-energy particle physics with quantum field theory in curved spacetime.

## Key findings

- Thermalized power spectrum consistent with Unruh temperature
- Excellent agreement with high-energy channeling experiments
- Confirmation of Bekenstein-Hawking area-entropy law in experiments

## Abstract

We examine the radiation emitted by high energy positrons channeled into silicon crystal samples. The positrons are modeled as semiclassical vector currents coupled to an Unruh-DeWitt detector to incorporate any local change in the energy of the positron. In the subsequent accelerated QED analysis, we discover a Larmor formula and power spectrum that are both thermalized by the acceleration. Thus, these systems explicitly exhibit thermalization of the detector energy gap at the celebrated Fulling-Davies-Unruh (FDU) temperature. Our derived power spectrum, with a nonzero energy gap, is then shown to have an excellent statistical agreement with high energy channeling experiments and also provides a method to directly measure the FDU temperature. We also investigate the Rindler horizon dynamics and confirm that the Bekenstein-Hawking area-entropy law is satisfied in these experiments. As such, we present the evidence for the first observation of acceleration-induced thermality in a non-analogue system.