Response of the Unruh-DeWitt detector in a gravitational wave background

Abstract

Applying the techniques of light-front quantization to quantize a scalar field in a monochromatic gravitational wave background, we manage to investigate the response of the Unruh-DeWitt detector coupled to a scalar field in the presence of a gravitational wave for the two cases moving along a free-falling trajectory and a constant-accelerating trajectory. The transition rate of the Unruh-DeWitt detector, in both cases, is different from the result with no gravitational wave, and the leading-order correction due to the gravitational wave survives the long-wavelength limit that formally takes the wavelength of the gravitational wave to infinity. This new effect of the gravitational wave on a quantum system is qualitatively different from that on a classical mechanical system, and cannot be understood in terms of gravitational wave tidal force.

32 pages, 2 figures; contains some of the same material in arXiv:1605.06656; v2: various minor improvements made, version to appear in PRD

References in corpus (4)

• The Unruh effect and its applications
• 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?
• Gravitational waves affect vacuum entanglement

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• Gravitational wave signals in an Unruh-DeWitt detector
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• Harvesting entanglement from the cylindrical gravitational wave spacetime