Unruh Effect under Non-equilibrium conditions: Oscillatory motion of an Unruh-DeWitt detector

Abstract

The Unruh effect refers to the thermal fluctuations a detector experiences while undergoing linear motion with uniform acceleration in a Minkowski vacuum. This thermality can be demonstrated by tracing the vacuum state of the field over the modes beyond the accelerated detector's event horizon. However, the event horizon is well-defined only if the detector moves with eternal uniform linear acceleration. This idealized condition cannot be fulfilled in realistic situations when the motion unavoidably involves periods of non-uniform acceleration. Many experimental proposals to test the Unruh effect are of this nature. Often circular or oscillatory motion, which lacks an obvious geometric description, is considered in such proposals. The proper perspective for theoretically going beyond, or experimentally testing, the Unruh-Hawking effect in these more general conditions has to be offered by concepts and techniques in non-equilibrium quantum field theory. In this paper we provide a detailed analysis of how an Unruh-DeWitt detector undergoing oscillatory motion responds to the fluctuations of a quantum field. Numerical results for the late-time temperatures of the oscillating detector are presented. We comment on the digressions of these results from what one would obtain from a naive application of Unruh's result.

23 pages, 11 figures. Minor revision, new references added

References in corpus (9)

• How often does the Unruh-DeWitt detector click? Regularisation by a spatial profile
• Then again, how often does the Unruh-DeWitt detector click if we switch it carefully?
• Signatures of the Unruh effect from electrons accelerated by ultra-strong laser fields
• Backreaction and Unruh effect: New insights from exact solutions of uniformly accelerated detectors
• Loss of Spin Entanglement For Accelerated Electrons in Electric and Magnetic Fields
• Unruh-DeWitt detector event rate for trajectories with time-dependent acceleration
• Entanglement of two qubits in a relativistic orbit
• Unruh Effect for General Trajectories
• Universality and thermalization in the Unruh Effect

Cited by in corpus (38)

• Acceleration-assisted entanglement harvesting and rangefinding
• Entanglement in curved spacetimes and cosmology
• Irreversible degradation of quantum coherence under relativistic motion
• Quantum metrology and estimation of Unruh effect
• Quantum teleportation between moving detectors
• Characterization of Unruh Channel in the context of Open Quantum Systems
• The Unruh Quantum Otto Engine
• Mechanically Generating Entangled Photons from the Vacuum: A Microwave Circuit-Acoustic Resonator Analogue of the Unruh Effect
• Motion induced radiation and quantum friction for a moving atom
• Analogue Gravity on a Superconducting Chip
• Clausius entropy for arbitrary bifurcate null surfaces
• Radiative Processes of Entangled Detectors in Rotating Frames
• Anti-Hawking Phenomena around a Rotating BTZ Black Hole
• Fluctuation-Dissipation and Correlation-Propagation Relations in $(1+3)$D Moving Detector-Quantum Field Systems
• Quantum radiation by an Unruh-DeWitt detector in oscillatory motion
• On the Unruh effect, trajectories and information
• Extreme electron acceleration with fixed radiation energy
• Dynamical Casimir effect in Circuit QED for Nonuniform Trajectories
• Decoherence of Topological Qubit in Linear and Circular Motions: Decoherence Impedance, Anti-Unruh and Information Backflow
• Laser Cosmology
• A Local First Law of Gravity
• Coherently amplifying photon production from vacuum with a dense cloud of accelerating photodetectors
• Qubit Motion as a Microscopic Model for the Dynamical Casimir Effect
• Real-time particle-detection probabilities in accelerated macroscopic detectors
• Electron response to radiation under linear acceleration: classical, QED and accelerated frame predictions
• Black-box estimation of expanding parameter for de Sitter universe
• The Unruh-DeWitt model and its joint interacting Hilbert space
• The Unruh effect and oscillating neutrinos
• Probing geometric information using the Unruh effect in the vacuum
• A time-frequency approach to relativistic correlations in quantum field theory
• Discriminating quantum field theories in non-inertial frames
• Relativistic single-electron wavepacket in quantum electromagnetic fields: Quantum coherence, correlations, and the Unruh effect
• Hot origin of the Little Bang
• Excitation of an inertial Unruh detector in the Minkowski vacuum: a numerical calculation using spherical modes
• Wigner function method for the Gibbons-Hawking and the Unruh effect
• Thermal radiation in curved spacetime using influence functional formalism
• Bipartite and tripartite entanglement in pure dephasing relativistic spin-boson model
• Time-dependent accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detector without event horizon