Quantum accelerometer: distinguishing inertial Bob from his accelerated twin Rob by a local measurement

Abstract

Single quantum system, such as Unruh-DeWitt detector, can be used to determine absolute acceleration by local measurements on a quantum field. To show this, we consider two kinematically indistinguishable scenarios: an inertial observer, Bob, measuring the field of an uniformly accelerated cavity, and his non-inertial twin Rob accelerating and making measurements in a stationary cavity. We find that these scenarios can be distinguished in the non-relativistic regime only by measurements on highly excited massive fields, allowing one to detect non-inertialness of the reference frame.

I.F. previously published as Fuentes-Guridi and Fuentes-Schuller

References in corpus (4)

• The Unruh effect and its applications
• Entangling Power of an Expanding Universe
• Transition rate of the Unruh-DeWitt detector in curved spacetime
• Then again, how often does the Unruh-DeWitt detector click if we switch it carefully?

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• Measuring motion through relativistic quantum effects
• Cohering and decohering power of massive scalar fields under instantaneous interactions
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• Particle Detectors, Cavities, and the Weak Equivalence Principle
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