Ambient temperature versus ambient acceleration in the circular motion Unruh effect

Abstract

It is well known that the experience of a linearly accelerated observer with acceleration $a$, interacting with a massless scalar field in its vacuum state in $3+1$ Minkowski spacetime, is identical to that of a static observer interacting with a massless scalar field in a thermal state of temperature $a/2\pi$ in $3+1$ Minkowski spacetime. We study the robustness of this duality by comparing an observer undergoing circular motion in a thermal bath with an observer that undergoes circular motion around a linearly accelerated trajectory. We find that in most regimes, observers in these two cases experience the field in different ways, and are generally able to tell the difference between the two cases by measuring observables localized along their trajectories.

19 pages, 3 figures. v2: sections 2 and 6 expanded after referee comments. v3: typos corrected. v4: added post-publication note

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