Temporal factorization of a non-stationary electromagnetic cavity field

Abstract

When an electromagnetic field is confined in a cavity of variable length, real photons may be generated from vacuum fluctuations due to highly nonadiabatic boundary conditions. The corresponding effective Hamiltonian is time-dependent and contains infinite intermode interactions. Considering one of the cavity mirrors fixed and the other describing uniform motion (zero acceleration), we show that it is possible to factorize the entire temporal dependency and write its formal solution, i.e., the Hamiltonian becomes a product of a time-dependent function and a time-independent operator. With this factorization, we prove in detail that the photon production is proportional to the Planck factor involving a velocity-dependent effective temperature. This temperature significantly limits photon generation even for ultra-relativistic motion. The time-dependent unitary transformations we introduce to obtain temporal factorization help establishing connections with the shortcuts to adiabaticity of quantum thermodynamics and with the quantum Arnold transformation.