From vacuum fluctuations to radiation. I. Accelerated detectors.

Abstract

The energy and particle fluxes emitted by an accelerated two level atom are analysed in detail. It is shown both perturbatively and non perturbatively that the total number of emitted photons is equal to the number of transitions characterizing thermal equilibrium thereby confirming that each internal transition is accompanied by the emission of a Minkowski quantum. The mean fluxes are then decomposed according to the final state of the atom and the notion of conditional flux is introduced. This notion is generalized so as to study the energy content of the vacuum fluctuations that induce the transitions of the accelerated atom. The physical relevance of these conditional fluxes is displayed and contact is made with the formalism of Aharonov et al. The same decomposition is then applied to isolate, in the context of black hole radiation, the energy content of the particular vacuum fluctuations which are converted into on mass shell quanta. It is shown that initially these fluctuations are located around the light like geodesic that shall generate the horizon and have exponentially large energy densities. Upon exiting from the star they break up into two pieces. The external one is red shifted and becomes an on mass shell quantum, the other, its ''partner", ends up in the singularity. We avail ourselves of this analysis to study back reaction effects to the production of a single quantum.