Circular motion in (anti-)de Sitter spacetime: thermality versus finite size

TL;DR

This paper investigates how an Unruh-DeWitt detector responds to a conformal scalar field in circular motion within (2+1)-dimensional anti-de Sitter and de Sitter spacetimes, revealing effects of curvature and temperature on detector response.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of detector responses in curved spacetimes, highlighting the influence of curvature and temperature, and draws parallels with boundary conditions in Minkowski space.

Findings

Resonance peaks in AdS match those in Minkowski with a cylindrical boundary, with curvature corrections.

Leading curvature correction in de Sitter is proportional to the cosmological constant $\\Lambda$.

Temperature corrections decay exponentially as $\Lambda \to 0$.

Abstract

Anti-de Sitter spacetime and the static patch of de Sitter spacetime are arenas for investigating thermal and finite-size effects seen by an accelerated quantum observer. We consider an Unruh-DeWitt detector in uniform circular motion coupled to a conformal scalar field in $(2+1)$-dimensional de Sitter and anti-de Sitter spacetimes in the limit of a small cosmological constant $\Lambda$. In anti-de Sitter spacetime, where $\Lambda$ mimics spatial confinement, we find that the resonance peaks in the detector's response closely match those of a detector in Minkowski space with a cylindrical boundary, but with curvature corrections, more significant when the field has an ambient temperature. In the static patch of de Sitter spacetime, in the Euclidean vacuum, we show that the leading curvature correction to the detector's response is proportional to $\Lambda$, as in zero temperature anti-de Sitter, whilst the temperature corrections decay exponentially as $\Lambda \to 0$.