Giant Unruh effect in hyperbolic metamaterial waveguides

The Unruh effect is the prediction that an accelerating object perceives its surroundings as a bath of thermal radiation, even if it accelerates in vacuum. The Unruh effect is believed to be very difficult to observe in an experiment, since an observer accelerating at g = 9.8 m/s(2) should see a vacuum temperature of only 4 x 10(-20) K. Here we demonstrate that photons in metamaterial waveguides may behave as massive quasi-particles accelerating at up to 10(24) g, which is about 12 orders of magnitude larger than the surface acceleration near a stellar black hole. These record high accelerations may enable experimental studies of the Unruh effect and the loss of quantum entanglement in strongly accelerated reference frames. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America