Acceleration-induced radiation from a qudit particle detector model

Abstract

We nonperturbatively examine the emission rate of acceleration-induced radiation from a uniformly accelerated gapless qudit-type Unruh-DeWitt detector. We find that the emission rate can be written as Larmor's formula multiplied by a factor that depends on the detector's initial state. In particular, certain initial states of integer-spin detectors do not produce radiation. Although the appearance of Larmor's formula may suggest a classical phenomenon, we argue that the resulting radiation is fundamentally distinct from that of structureless classical sources, as it evolves into a multimode coherent state correlated with the detector's internal degree of freedom. Thus, gapless detectors cannot be treated as structureless sources, as previously proposed.

(v1)10 pages, 1 figure; (v2) published version