The analysis of uniformly longitudinally extended detector is performed and it is shown that the response of such a detector does not differ from the response of the Unruh detector, but the its excitation is caused not by the thermal bath, but by interaction with the fluctuations of the quantum field by virtual quanta.
In this work we discuss the process of measurements by a detector in an uniformly accelerated rectilinear motion, interacting linearly with a massive scalar field. The detector model for field quanta is a point-like system with a ground state and a continuum of unbounded states. We employ the Glauber theory of photodetection. In an uniformly accelerated reference frame, the detector, interacting with the field prepared in an arbitrary state of the Rindler Fock space, is excited only by absorption processes. For the uniformly accelerated detector prepared in the ground state, we evaluate the transition probability rate in three important situations. In the first one the field is prepared in an arbitrary state of $n$-Rindler quanta, then we consider a thermal Rindler state at a given temperature $beta^{-1}$, and finally the case in which the state of the field is taken to be the Minkowski vacuum. The well-known result that the latter excitation rates are equal is recovered. Accelerated or inertial observer interpretations of the measurements performed by the accelerated detector is presented. Finally, we investigate the behaviour of the detector in a frame which is inertial in the remote past but in the far future becomes uniformly accelerated. For the massless case, we obtain that the transition probability rate of the detector in the far future is tantamount to the analogous quantity for the detector at rest in a non-inertial reference frame interacting with the field prepared in an usual thermal state.
We investigate the entanglement dynamics of two uniformly accelerated atoms with the same acceleration perpendicular to their separation. The two-atom system is treated as an open system coupled with fluctuating electromagnetic fields in the Minkowski vacuum, and in the Born-Markov approximation the master equation that describes the completely positive time evolution of the two-atom system is derived. In particular, we investigate the phenomena of entanglement degradation, generation, revival and enhancement. As opposed to the scalar-field case, the entanglement dynamics is crucially dependent on the polarization directions of the atoms. For the two-atom system with certain acceleration and separation, the polarization directions of the atoms may determine whether entanglement generation, revival or enhancement happens, while for entanglement degradation, they affect the decay rate of entanglement. A comparison between the entanglement evolution of accelerated atoms and that of static ones immersed in a thermal bath at the Unruh temperature shows that they are the same only when the acceleration is extremely small.
We investigate the quantum radiation emitted by a uniformly accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detector in de Sitter spacetime. We find that there exists a non-vanishing quantum radiation at late times in the radiation zone of the conformally flat coordinates, which cover the region behind the cosmological horizon for the accelerated detector. The theoretical structure of producing the late-time quantum radiation is similar to that of the same model in Minkowski spacetime: it comes from a nonlocal correlation of the quantum field in the Bunch-Davies vacuum state, which can be traced back to the entanglement between the field modes defined in different regions in de Sitter spacetime.
We discuss different physical effects related to the uniform acceleration of atoms in vacuum, in the framework of quantum electrodynamics. We first investigate the van der Waals/Casimir-Polder dispersion and resonance interactions between two uniformly accelerated atoms in vacuum. We show that the atomic acceleration significantly affects the van der Waals force, yielding a different scaling of the interaction with the interatomic distance and an explicit time dependence of the interaction energy. We argue how these results could allow for an indirect detection of the Unruh effect through dispersion interactions between atoms. We then consider the resonance interaction between two accelerated atoms, prepared in a correlated Bell-type state, and interacting with the electromagnetic field in the vacuum state, separating vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction contributions, both in the free-space and in the presence of a perfectly reflecting plate. We show that nonthermal effects of acceleration manifest in the resonance interaction, yielding a change of the distance dependence of the resonance interaction energy. This suggests that the equivalence between temperature and acceleration does not apply to all radiative properties of accelerated atoms. To further explore this aspect, we evaluate the resonance interaction between two atoms in non inertial motion in the coaccelerated (Rindler) frame and show that in this case the assumption of an Unruh temperature for the field is not required for a complete equivalence of locally inertial and coaccelerated points of views.
The Casimir forces between two plates moving parallel to each other are found by calculating the vacuum electromagnetic stress tensor. The perpendicular force between the plates is modified by the motion but there is no lateral force on the plates. Electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations do not therefore give rise to quantum friction in this case, contrary to previous assertions. The result shows that the Casimir-Polder force on a particle moving at constant speed parallel to a plate also has no lateral component.