Considerations on the Unruh effect: causality and regularization

By S. Schlicht. 2003

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper is motivated by the observation that calculations of the Unruh effect based on idealized particle detectors are usually made in a way that involves integrations along the entire detector trajectory up to the infinitely remote future. We derive an expression which allows time-dependence of the detector response in the case of a non-stationary trajectory and conforms more explicitly to the principle of causality, namely that the response at a given instant of time depends only on the detectors past movements. On trying to reproduce the thermal Unruh spectrum we are led to an unphysical result, which we trace down to the use of the standard regularization t → t − ie of the correlation function. By consistently employing a rigid detector of finite extension, we are led to a different regularization which works fine with our causal response function.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de8be3c215aacc5efb07644124890b6fa6bf2dbc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. L. Crispino
2. A. Higuchi
3. George Matsas
4. Jorma Louko
5. A. Satz
6. T. Jacobson

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. L. Crispino
2. A. Higuchi
3. George Matsas
4. Jorma Louko
5. A. Satz
6. T. Jacobson
7. Stefano Liberati
8. D. Mattingly

Citations in the corpus

• The Unruh effect and its applications (2007, methodology): “Recently Louko and Satz (2006) have found a formula for the excitation rate of the Unruh-DeWitt detector with any trajectory in Minkowski spacetime for the massless scalar field, building on works by Schlicht (2004) and Langlois (2005, 2006).”
• Introduction to Quantum Fields in Curved Spacetime and the Hawking Effect (2003, background): “(For a careful discussion of the regularization required in the case of a point detector see [22].”
• Transition rate of the Unruh–DeWitt detector in curved spacetime (2007, methodology): “Case studies have shown that the result depends on the choice of the time function for the Minkowski vacuum in Minkowski space [6, 7, 20, 21] and the Euclidean vacuum in de Sitter space [20, 21], and the methods of [7, appendix A] can be adapted to show that the same holds for arbitrary Hadamard sta”