Talk detail

Participant	Toussaint, Vladimir
Institution	The University of Nottingham - University Park - Nottingham - Nottinghamshire - United Kingdom

Session	EU2	Accepted		Order	Time
Talk	Oral abstract	Title	Unruh-DeWitt Fermion Detector in (1+1)-Dimensions: Arbitrary Worldlines and Inequivalent Spin Structures
Coauthors
Abstract	We examine an Unruh-DeWitt particle detector that is coupled linearly to the scalar density of a massless Dirac field in $(1+1)$-dimensional Minkowski spacetime and on its cylindrical quotient, allowing the detector's motion to remain arbitrary, working to leading order in perturbation theory, and setting the field in a vacuum state with respect to Minkowski time translations. In Minkowski the detector's response is identical to that of a detector coupled linearly to a massless scalar field in four-dimensional Minkowski space, exhibiting no infrared ambiguity, and leading to the usual Unruh effect results in the special case of uniform acceleration. On the cylinder the detector's response distinguishes the periodic and antiperiodic spin structures, and the zero mode that is present for periodic spinors contributes to the response by a state-dependent but well defined and controllable amount. Explicit analytic and numerical results on the cylinder are obtained for inertial and uniformly accelerated trajctories, recovering the Minkowski space results in the limit of large circumference.
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