Local quantum detection of cosmological expansion: Unruh-DeWitt in spatially compact Milne

TL;DR

This paper investigates how an Unruh-DeWitt detector responds to quantum fields in a (1+1)-dimensional Milne universe with compact spatial sections, revealing sensitivity to both classical and quantum environmental properties.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the detector's response in an expanding Milne universe with compact spatial sections, including asymptotic and numerical results, highlighting the detector's sensitivity to environmental quantum states.

Findings

Detector response approaches Minkowski vacuum in large energy gap limit.

Response converges to that in a static Minkowski cylinder at late times.

Numerical results interpolate between different regimes, confirming sensitivity to environment.

Abstract

We analyse the excitations and de-excitations of an inertial Unruh-DeWitt detector in the $(1+1)$-dimensional expanding Milne cosmology with compact spatial sections, coupled to a real massless scalar field with either untwisted or twisted boundary conditions, prepared in the conformal vacuum. We find the detector's response as a function of the energy gap, the Milne spatial circumference parameter, the interaction duration, the age of the universe at the switch-on moment, the detector's peculiar velocity at the switch-on moment, and, for the untwisted field, the state of the zero mode. Asymptotic analytic results are obtained at large energy gap and at large circumference parameter, in each case recovering the Minkowski vacuum response in the leading order, and in the double limit of small circumference parameter and late cosmological time, recovering the response in a static Minkowski cylinder. Numerical results are given in the interpolating regimes. The results confirm the detector's sensitivity to both classical and quantum properties of its environment.