The Unruh effect without space–time

Abstract

We show how the characteristic thermal effects found for a quantum field in space–time geometries admitting a causal horizon can be found in a simple quantum system living on the real line. The analysis we present is essentially group theoretic in nature: a thermal state emerges naturally when comparing representations of the group of affine transformations of the real line. The freedom in the choice of different notions of translation generators is the key to the one-dimensional Unruh effect we describe.