Response of the Unruh-DeWitt detector in a gravitational wave background

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a gravitational wave influences the response of an Unruh-DeWitt detector, revealing a unique quantum effect that persists even at long wavelengths and differs from classical expectations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of the Unruh-DeWitt detector's response in a gravitational wave background using light-front quantization, highlighting effects not attributable to tidal forces.

Findings

Gravitational waves alter the detector's transition rate.

The correction persists in the long-wavelength limit.

The effect differs from classical gravitational influences.

Abstract

Applying the techniques of light-front quantization to quantize a scalar field in a monochromatic gravitational wave background, we manage to investigate the response of the Unruh-DeWitt detector coupled to a scalar field in the presence of a gravitational wave for the two cases moving along a free-falling trajectory and a constant-accelerating trajectory. The transition rate of the Unruh-DeWitt detector, in both cases, is different from the result with no gravitational wave, and the leading-order correction due to the gravitational wave survives the long-wavelength limit that formally takes the wavelength of the gravitational wave to infinity. This new effect of the gravitational wave on a quantum system is qualitatively different from that on a classical mechanical system, and cannot be understood in terms of gravitational wave tidal force.