McGill.CA / Science / Department of Physics

Informal Pizza Seminar

Stress Energy as Seen by Unruh's Detector

Björn Garbrecht

University of Heidelberg

There is a striking bias between the thermal response of Unruh's detector in de Sitter space, when calculated at first order perturbation theory, and the energy density, which falls as a power law with particle momentum. However, in order to capture the effect of pair creation, one needs to consider the detector response at second order. For the minimally coupled scalar field I find an agreement with the stress-energy tensor. Similarly, there is also an enhancement of the Unruh effect w.r.t. a thermal spectrum.

Tuesday, September 14th 2004, 13:00
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, room 326