Probing the Circular Unruh Effect with Cavity-Controlled Lamb Shifts

Abstract

The Unruh effect predicts that accelerated observers perceive the inertial vacuum as populated by particles, providing a flat-spacetime analogue of Hawking radiation. Its direct observation, however, remains experimentally challenging, since an Unruh temperature of $1\,\mathrm{K}$ requires accelerations of order $10^{20}\,\mathrm{m/s^2}$. Here, we show that the Lamb shift of a centripetally accelerated atom inside a high-$Q$ cavity provides a sensitive spectroscopic probe of the Unruh effect at dramatically lower accelerations. The cavity reshapes the electromagnetic density of states and converts otherwise tiny noninertial corrections into tunable level shifts. Depending on the atomic angular velocity and cavity detuning, the Lamb shift can be enhanced, strongly quenched, or completely screened. Remarkably, for experimentally realistic parameters, a rotation-induced shift of order $10\;\mathrm{Hz}$ can arise already at accelerations as low as $0.5\,\mathrm{m/s^2}$, more than twenty orders of magnitude below the acceleration scale conventionally associated with direct Unruh detection. These results identify cavity-controlled Lamb-shift spectroscopy as a viable route toward laboratory tests of the circular Unruh effect in the ultralow-acceleration regime.