Prof Subir Sarkar

Abstract:

Detecting thermal Unruh radiation from accelerated electrons has presented a formidable challenge due not only to technical difficulties but also for lack of conceptual clarity about what is actually seen by a laboratory observer. We give a summary of the current interpretations along with a simpler heuristic description that draws on the analogy between the Unruh effect and radiation from a two-level atomic system. We propose an experiment to test whether there is emission of thermal photons from an accelerated electron.

Abstract:

The existence of ‘peculiar’ velocities due to the formation of cosmic structure marks a point of discord between the real universe and the usually assumed Friedmann–Lemaítre–Robertson–Walker metric, which accomodates only the smooth Hubble expansion on large scales. In the standard ΛCDM model framework, Type Ia supernovae data are routinely “corrected” for the peculiar velocities of both the observer and the supernova host galaxies relative to the cosmic rest frame, in order to infer evidence for acceleration of the expansion rate from their Hubble diagram. However, observations indicate a strong, coherent local bulk flow that continues outward without decaying out to a redshift 𝑧≳0.1, contrary to the ΛCDM expectation. By querying the halo catalogue of the Dark Sky Hubble-volume N-body simulation, we find that an observer placed in an unusual environment like our local universe should see correlations between supernovae in the JLA catalogue that are 2–8 times stronger than seen by a typical or Copernican observer. This accounts for our finding that peculiar velocity corrections have a large impact on the value of the cosmological constant inferred from supernova data. We also demonstrate that local universe-like observers will infer a downward biased value of the clustering parameter 𝑆8 from comparing the density and velocity fields. More realistic modelling of the peculiar local universe is thus essential for correctly interpreting cosmological data.