Thermalization of particle detectors: The Unruh effect and its reverse

Abstract

We study the Anti-Unruh effect in general stationary scenarios. We find that, for accelerated trajectories, a particle detector coupled to a KMS state of a quantum field can cool down (click less often) as the KMS temperature increases. Remarkably, this is so even when the detector is switched on adiabatically for infinitely long times. We also show that the Anti-Unruh effect is characteristic of accelerated detectors, and cannot appear for inertially moving detectors (e.g., in a thermal bath).

11 pages, 3 Figures. RevTeX 4.1. V2: Added new section IV, corrected minor typos and updated to match published version. Notice the title change to match published version

References in corpus (3)

• Wavepacket detection with the Unruh-DeWitt model
• Backreaction and Unruh effect: New insights from exact solutions of uniformly accelerated detectors
• Particle detectors and the zero mode of a quantum field

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