Decoherence of the Unruh Detector

A detector undergoing uniform acceleration $a$ in a vacuum field responds just as though it were immersed in thermal radiation of temperature $T=\hbar a/2\pi k c$. A simple, intuitive derivation of this result is given for the case of a scalar field in one spatial dimension. The approach is then extended to treat the case where the field seen by the accelerated observer is a spin-1/2 Dirac field.

An accelerated particle sees the Minkowski vacuum as thermally excited, which is called the Unruh effect. Due to an interaction with the thermal bath, the particle moves stochastically like the Brownian motion in a heat bath. It has been discussed that the accelerated charged particle may emit extra radiation (the Unruh radiation) besides the Larmor radiation, and experiments are under planning to detect such radiation by using ultrahigh intensity lasers. There are, however, ...

In this paper, we investigate the quantum coherence extraction for two accelerating Unruh-DeWitt detectors coupling to a scalar background in $3+1$ Minkowski spacetime. We find that quantum coherence as a sort of nonclassical correlation can be generated through the Markovian evolution of the detectors system just like quantum entanglement. However, with growing Unruh temperature, in contrast to monotonous degrading entanglement, we find that quantum coherence exhibits a stri...

We study memory effects as information backflow for an accelerating two-level detector weakly interacting with a scalar field in the Minkowski vacuum. This is the framework of the well-known Unruh effect: the detector behaves as if it were in a thermal bath with a temperature proportional to its acceleration. Here we show that if we relax the usual assumption of an eternally uniformly accelerating system, and we instead consider the more realistic case in which a finite-size ...

We investigate unitarily inequivalent representations of the algebra of operators in quantum field theory. In those cases that exist a Fock representation of the commutation relations, we have a unique no-quanta state. We examine more closely the operational definition of a measuring device which detect a quantum of an Hermitian scalar field. The Unruh-DeWitt and Glauber model of quanta detectors are discussed. In Minkowski spacetime, the transition probability per unit prope...

Unruh-deWitt detectors have been utilised widely as probes for quantum particles, entanglement and spacetime curvature. Here, we extend the standard treatment of an Unruh-deWitt detector interacting with a massless, scalar field to include the detector travelling in a quantum superposition of classical trajectories. We derive perturbative expressions for the final state of the detector, and show that it depends on field correlation functions evaluated locally along the indivi...

In this paper it is explicitly demonstrated that the energy conservation law is kept when a detector uniformly accelerated in the Minkowski vacuum is excited and emits a particle. This fact had been hidden in conventional approaches in which detectors were considered to be forced on trajectories. To lift the veil we suggest a detector model written in terms of the Minkowski coordinates. In this model the Hamiltonian of the detector involves a classical potential term instead ...

We investigate the Minkowski ground state associated with a real massless scalar field as seen by an accelerated observer under the perspective of the de Broglie-Bohm quantum theory. We use the Schr\"odinger picture to obtain the wave functional associated with the Minkowski vacuum in Rindler coordinates, and we calculate the field trajectories through the Bohmian guidance equations. The Unruh temperature naturally emerges from the calculus of the average energy, but the Bohm...

Unruh effect states that the vacuum of a quantum field theory on Minkovski space-time looks like a thermal state for an eternal uniformly accelerated observer. Adaptation to the non eternal case causes a serious problem: if the thermalization of the vacuum depends on the lifetime of the observer, then in principle the latest is able to deduce its lifetime from the measurement of the temperature. This short note aims at underlining that time-energy uncertainty relation allows ...

We present a method for relating the transition rate of an accelerated Unruh-deWitt detector to the rate of the same detector when stationary in Minkowski space. Furthermore, we show that when using the detector as a model for decay, its transition rate can be related directly to the decay rate obtained from QFT. Combined this provides a straightforward method for calculating the decay rate of accelerated particles to first order in the coupling constants.