Quantum electrodynamics based on self-fields: On the origin of thermal radiation detected by an accelerating observer

Abstract

We continue with our series of papers concerning a self-field approach to quantum electrodynamics that is not second quantized. We use the theory here to show that a detector with a uniform acceleration a will respond to its own self-field as if immersed in a thermal photon bath at temperature $T_a$=ħa/2πkc. This is the celebrated Unruh effect, and it is closely related to the emission of Hawking radiation from the event horizon of a black hole. Our approach is novel in that the radiation field is classical and not quantized; the vacuum field being identically zero with no zero-point energy. From our point of view, all radiative effects are accounted for when the self-field of the detector, and not the hypothetical zero-point field of the vacuum, acts back on the detector in a quantum-electrodynamic analog of the classical phenomenon of radiation reaction. When the detector is accelerating, its transformed self-field induces a different back reaction than when it is moving inertially. This process gives rise to the appearance of a photon bath, but the photons are not real in the sense that the space surrounding the accelerating detector is truly empty of radiation, a fact that is verified by the null response of an inertially moving detector in the same vicinity. The thermal photons are in this sense fictitious, and they have no independent existence outside the detector.