Unruh Effect in the General Light-Front Frame

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Unruh effect within a massless scalar field theory quantized on the light-front, demonstrating its thermal nature in uniformly accelerating frames and analyzing the vacuum's thermal properties from a Hilbert space perspective.

Contribution

It extends the understanding of the Unruh effect to the light-front quantization framework and derives the thermal behavior using coordinate transformations and Hilbert space analysis.

Findings

Propagator exhibits thermal character in accelerating frames

Vacuum appears as a thermal vacuum to Rindler observers

Temperature follows Tolman's law in this setting

Abstract

We study the phenomenon of Unruh effect in a massless scalar field theory quantized on the light-front in the general light-front frame. We determine the uniformly accelerating coordinates in such a frame and through a direct transformation show that the propagator of the theory has a thermal character in the uniformly accelerating coordinate system with a temperature given by Tolman's law. We also carry out a systematic analysis of this phenomenon from the Hilbert space point of view and show that the vacuum of this theory appears as a thermal vacuum to a Rindler observer with the same temperature as given by Tolman's law.