On the cancellation mechanism of radiation from the Unruh detector

Abstract

A uniformly accelerated detector (Unruh detector) in the Minkowski vacuum is excited as if it is exposed to the thermal bath with temperature proportional to its acceleration. In the inertial frame, since both of an excitation and a deexcitation of the detector are accompanied by emission of radiation into the Minkowski vacuum, one may suspect that the Unruh detector emits radiation like the Larmor radiation from an accelerated charged particle. However, it is known that the radiation is miraculously cancelled by a quantum interference effect. In this paper, we investigate under what condition the radiation cancels out. We first show that the cancellation occurs if the Green function satisfies a relation similar to the Kubo-Martin-Schwinger (KMS) condition. We then study two examples, Unruh detectors in the 3+1 dimensional Minkowski spacetime and in the de Sitter spacetime. In both cases, the relation holds only in a restricted region of the spacetime, but the radiation is cancelled in the whole spacetime. Hence the KMS-like relation is necessary but not sufficient for the cancellation to occur.