Morgan Lynch, Physics, UW-Milwaukee
Physics – Room 481

Abstract: Since the discoveries of Parker, Hawking, and Unruh, namely cosmological particle creation, black hole evaporation, and accelerated radiation, respectively, a general notion has emerged that the particle content of spacetime is an observer-dependent quantity. For example, with the Unruh effect an observer undergoing uniform acceleration, a, will find the Minkowski vacuum state to be a thermalized bath of particles at temperature t ~ a. Directly measuring this, or related phenomena, has remained outside the reach of our current experimental capabilities. Indirect measurements, such as the acceleration-dependent lifetime of particles, could provide a better avenue for verifying these effects. In this talk, I will discuss how acceleration affects the decay rates of unstable particles and show a generalized formalism which includes arbitrary final state multiplicities. I will then analyze the electron and muon system and compute the transition rates and lifetimes for accelerated electrons and muons as well as the branching fractions for muon decay.