What happens once an accelerating observer has detected a Rindler particle?

Abstract

In a seminal paper, Unruh and Wald found that the detection of a right Rindler particle by a linearly uniformly accelerated detector coupled to a Klein-Gordon field in the Minkowski vacuum leads to the creation of a Minkowski particle from the inertial viewpoint. In this paper, we revisit the framework studied by Unruh and Wald, but now consider in addition what happens once the particle has been measured somewhere in the right Rindler wedge. From an orthodox point of view, the change in the field state induced by the measurement is non-local and occurs both in the left and right Rindler wedges. If one takes semiclassical gravity seriously in this context, this seems to open the possiblity for designing superluminal communication protocols between two spacelike separated observers confined to the right and left Rindler wedges respectively. We discuss the possible ways in which physics could prevent such measurement-induced, faster-than-light signaling protocols.

27 pages

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Back-action from inertial and non-inertial Unruh-DeWitt detectors revisited in covariant perturbation theory
• The Unruh effect under the de Broglie-Bohm perspective
• Repeated measurements on non-replicable systems and their consequences for Unruh-DeWitt detectors