Probing the Unruh effect with an accelerated extended system.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31292437.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-10962-y and PMC identifier 6620287.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
It has been proved in the context of quantum fields in Minkowski spacetime that the vacuum state is a thermal state according to uniformly accelerated observers-a seminal result known as the Unruh effect. Recent claims, however, have challenged the validity of this result for extended systems, thus casting doubts on its physical reality. Here, we study the dynamics of an extended system, uniformly accelerated in the vacuum. We show that its reduced density matrix evolves to a Gibbs thermal state with local temperature given by the Unruh temperature [Formula: see text], where a is the system's spatial-dependent proper acceleration-c is the speed of light and k<sub>B</sub> and [Formula: see text] are the Boltzmann's and the reduced Planck's constants, respectively. This proves that the vacuum state does induce thermalization of an accelerated extended system-which is all one can expect of a legitimate thermal reservoir.