Coherences of accelerated detectors and the local character of the Unruh effect

TL;DR

This paper investigates the local nature of the Unruh effect by developing a new formalism for macroscopic detectors, revealing that the acceleration temperature is a local property of field observables rather than a global thermal phenomenon.

Contribution

It introduces a novel formalism for modeling macroscopic detectors and derives coherence functions, demonstrating the local character of the Unruh effect in quantum field theory.

Findings

Detection time fluctuations are thermal for a single detector.

Correlations between two detectors are non-thermal.

Unruh effect is fundamentally local, tied to local field observables.

Abstract

We study the locality of the acceleration temperature in the Unruh effect. To this end, we develop a new formalism for the modeling of macroscopic irreversible detectors. In particular, the formalism allows for the derivation of the higher-order coherence functions, analogous to the ones employed in quantum optics, that encode temporal fluctuations and correlations in particle detection. We derive a causal and approximately local-in-time expression for an Unruh-Dewitt detector moving in a general path in Minkowski spacetime. Moreover, we derive the second-order coherence function for uniformly accelerated Unruh-Dewitt detectors. We find that the fluctuations in detection time for a single Unruh-Dewitt detector are thermal. However, the correlations in detection-time between two Unruh-Dewitt detectors with the same acceleration but separated by a finite distance are not thermal. This result suggests that the Unruh effect is fundamentally local, in the sense that the notion of acceleration temperature applies only to the properties of local field observables.