Unruh effect for detectors in superposition of accelerations

Autor(en)

Luis C. Barbado, Esteban Castro-Ruiz, Luca Apadula, Časlav Brukner

Abstrakt

The Unruh effect is the phenomenon that accelerated observers detect particles even when inertial observers experience the vacuum state. In particular, uniformly accelerated observers are predicted to measure thermal radiation that is proportional to the acceleration. Here we consider the Unruh effect for a detector that follows a quantum superposition of different accelerated trajectories in Minkowski spacetime. More precisely, we analyze the excitations of a pointlike multilevel particle detector coupled to a massless real scalar field and moving in the superposition of accelerated trajectories. We find that the state of the detector excitations is, in general, not a mere (convex) mixture of the thermal spectrum characteristics of the Unruh effect for each trajectory with well-defined acceleration separately. Rather, for certain trajectories and excitation levels, and upon the measurement of the trajectory state, the state of the detector excitations features in addition off-diagonal terms. The off-diagonal terms of these "superpositions of thermal states" are related to the distinguishability of the different possible states in which the field is left after its interaction with detector's internal degrees of the freedom.

Organisation(en)

Forschungsverbund Quantum Aspects of Space Time, Quantenoptik, Quantennanophysik und Quanteninformation

Externe Organisation(en)

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW)

Journal

Physical Review D

Band

102

Seiten

045002

Anzahl der Seiten

16

ISSN

2470-0010

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.102.045002

Publikationsdatum

08-2020

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

103024 Quantenfeldtheorie, 103028 Relativitätstheorie

Schlagwörter

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/e4762655-6079-437e-b742-1c7feaec7630