Spontaneous Emission by Rotating Objects: A Scattering Approach

• Main Authors: Jaffe, Robert L. (Contributor), Kardar, Mehran (Contributor), Maghrebi, Mohammad F (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society, 2012-08-30T14:50:08Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

We study the quantum electrodynamics vacuum in the presence of a body rotating along its axis of symmetry and show that the object spontaneously emits energy if it is lossy. The radiated power is expressed as a general trace formula solely in terms of the scattering matrix, making an explicit connection to the conjecture of Zel'dovich [ JETP Lett. 180 14 (1971)] on rotating objects. We further show that a rotating body drags along nearby objects while making them spin parallel to its own rotation axis.
United States. Dept. of Energy (agreement no. DF-FC02-94ER40818)
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant no. DMR-08-03315)