Inertial non-vacuum states viewed from the Rindler frame

TL;DR

This paper studies how inertial non-vacuum quantum states appear from the perspective of the Rindler frame, revealing a universal thermal component and analyzing the effects of non-normalizable states on detector responses.

Contribution

It introduces a general formalism for characterizing inertial states in arbitrary foliations and applies it to Rindler frames, analyzing the response of Unruh-Dewitt detectors to non-vacuum states.

Findings

Inertial states always have a thermal component in the Rindler frame.

Correction terms decay with Rindler mode energy for normalizable states.

Non-normalizable states produce constant high-frequency contributions.

Abstract

The appearance of the inertial vacuum state in Rindler frame has been extensively studied in the literature, both from the point of view of QFT developed using Rindler foliation and using the response of an Unruh-Dewitt Detector (UDD). In comparison, less attention has been devoted to the study of inertial non-vacuum states when viewed from the Rindler frame. We provide a comprehensive study of this issue in this paper. We first present a general formalism describing characterization of an arbitrary inertial state when described using (i) an arbitrary foliation and (ii) the response of UDD moving along an arbitrary trajectory. We use this formalism to explicitly compute the results for the Rindler frame and uniformly accelerated detectors. Any arbitrary inertial state will always have a thermal component in the Rindler frame with additional contributions arising from the non-vacuum nature of the inertial state. We classify the nature of the additional contributions in terms of functions characterizing the inertial state. We establish that for all physically well behaved normalizable inertial states, the correction terms decay with the energy of the Rindler mode so that the high frequency limit is dominated by the thermal noise. However, inertial states which are not strictly normalizable, lead to a constant contribution at all high frequencies in the Rindler frame. A similar behavior arises in the response of the UDD as well. In the case of the detector response, we provide a physical interpretation for the constant contribution at high frequencies in terms of total detection rate of co-moving inertial detectors. We discuss two different approaches for defining a transition rate for the UDD, when the two-point function lacks the time translation invariance and discuss several features of different definitions of transition rates. The implications are discussed.