Simulation of the Unruh signals of decoherence with quantum circuits

Abstract

Detecting the Unruh effect is currently an important experimental goal, but it is difficult to realize under laboratory conditions because of the extreme acceleration required for observable signals. Therefore, various schemes for indirect detection have been proposed. Recently, Nesterov and his collaborators discovered that the exponential phase decay in the decoherence of a uniformly accelerated particle detector can significantly improve the conditions for measuring the Unruh effect, and the acceleration required for observable signals can be considerably reduced to ∼1013m/s2. We notice that this exponential phase decay is consistent with its counterpart of the dephasing channel in quantum information theory. In this paper, we use the IBM quantum cloud platform to construct a quantum circuit that can realize the dephasing channel, successfully simulate the Unruh signal, and test the correctness of the method.