Spacetime diamonds

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that localized spacetime modes, called diamonds, exhibit thermal particle distributions akin to the Unruh effect, with temperature inversely related to their size, and explores their entanglement properties.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of spacetime diamonds and shows their thermal behavior and entanglement structure in Minkowski vacuum, extending understanding of localized quantum field modes.

Findings

Diamond modes have thermal particle distributions in Minkowski vacuum.

The temperature of a diamond mode is inversely proportional to its size.

Entanglement between neighboring diamonds is the dominant correlation.

Abstract

We show that the particle-number distribution of diamond modes, modes that are localized in a finite space-time region, are thermal for the Minkowski vacuum state of a massless scalar field, an analogue to the Unruh effect. The temperature of the diamond is inversely proportional to its size. An inertial observer can detect this thermal radiation by coupling to the diamond modes using an appropriate energy-scaled detector. We further investigate the correlations between various diamonds and find that entanglement between adjacent diamonds dominates.