The equivalence principle and QFT: Can a particle detector tell if we live inside a hollow shell?

Abstract

We show that a particle detector can distinguish the interior of a hollow shell from flat space for switching times much shorter than the light-crossing time of the shell, even though the local metrics are indistinguishable. This shows that a particle detector can read out information about the non-local structure of spacetime even when switched on for scales much shorter than the characteristic scale of the non-locality.

9 pages, 5 figures. ReVTeX 4.1

References in corpus (8)

• How often does the Unruh-DeWitt detector click? Regularisation by a spatial profile
• Entanglement harvesting from the electromagnetic vacuum with hydrogenlike atoms
• Wavepacket detection with the Unruh-DeWitt model
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• Violation of the strong Huygen's principle and timelike signals from the early Universe
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