On the relation between Unruh and Sokolov--Ternov effects

Emil T. Akhmedov, Douglas Singleton

Published 2006-10-29, updated 2007-05-13Version 4

We show that the Sokolov--Ternov effect -- the depolarization of particles in storage rings coming from synchrotron radiation due to spin flip transitions -- is physically equivalent to the Unruh effect for circular acceleration if one uses a spin 1/2 particle as the Unruh--DeWitt detector. It is shown that for the electron, with gyromagnetic number $g \approx 2$, the exponential contribution to the polarization, which usually characterizes the Unruh effect, is "hidden" in the standard Sokolov-Ternov effect making it hard to observe. Thus, our conclusions are different in detail from previous work.