A brief remark on Unruh effect and causality

Abstract

Unruh effect states that the vacuum of a quantum field theory on Minkovski space-time looks like a thermal state for an eternal uniformly accelerated observer. Adaptation to the non eternal case causes a serious problem: if the thermalization of the vacuum depends on the lifetime of the observer, then in principle the latest is able to deduce its lifetime from the measurement of the temperature. This short note aims at underlining that time-energy uncertainty relation allows to adapt Unruh effect to non-eternal observers without breaking causality. In particular we show that our adaptation - the diamonds's temperature- of Bisognano-Wichman approach to Unruh effect is causally acceptable. This note is self-contained but it is fully meaningful as a complement to gr-qc/0212074 as well as a comment on gr-qc/0306022.

One reference corrected

References in corpus (10)

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• Horizon Entropy
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• Diamonds's Temperature: Unruh effect for bounded trajectories and thermal time hypothesis
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Thermal time and the Tolman-Ehrenfest effect: temperature as the "speed of time"
• q-generalized Tsallis thermostatistics in Unruh effect for mixed fields
• Conformal mapping of Unruh temperature
• Coherences of accelerated detectors and the local character of the Unruh effect
• Modular Theory, Non-Commutative Geometry and Quantum Gravity
• Unruh effect without Rindler horizon
• Hawking-Unruh hadronization and strangeness production in high energy collisions
• Unruh thermalization, gluon condensation and freeze-out