Uniformly accelerated Brownian oscillator in (2+1)D: temperature-dependent dissipation and frequency shift

TL;DR

This paper studies a quantum harmonic oscillator detector in (2+1)D spacetime, revealing that its dissipation and frequency shift depend on acceleration temperature, with the system reaching thermal equilibrium at the Unruh temperature.

Contribution

It demonstrates temperature-dependent dissipation and frequency shifts for an accelerated quantum detector, contrasting with inertial cases and traditional open system models.

Findings

Dissipation rate depends on acceleration temperature.

Frequency shift varies with acceleration temperature.

System reaches thermal equilibrium at Unruh temperature.

Abstract

We consider an Unruh-DeWitt detector modeled as a harmonic oscillator that is coupled to a massless quantum scalar field in the (2+1)-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. We treat the detector as an open quantum system and employ a quantum Langevin equation to describe its time evolution, with the field, which is characterized by a frequency-independent spectral density, acting as a stochastic force. We investigate a point-like detector moving with constant acceleration through the Minkowski vacuum and an inertial one immersed in a thermal reservoir at the Unruh temperature, exploring the implications of the well-known non-equivalence between the two cases on their dynamics. We find that both the accelerated detector's dissipation rate and the shift of its frequency caused by the coupling to the field bath depend on the acceleration temperature. Interestingly enough this is not only in contrast to the case of inertial motion in a heat bath but also to any analogous quantum Brownian motion model in open systems, where dissipation and frequency shifts are not known to exhibit temperature dependencies. Nonetheless, we show that the fluctuating-dissipation theorem still holds for the detector-field system and in the weak-coupling limit an accelerated detector is driven at late times to a thermal equilibrium state at the Unruh temperature.