Response of the Unruh-DeWitt detector in a gravitational wave background

Chen, Bo-Hung; Chiou, Dah-Wei

doi:10.1103/physrevd.105.024053

Cited by 4 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…In particular in Refs. [1,6] the correct frequency poles were identified and Ref. [6] obtained similar results for the Jordan function (2.21).…”

Section: Incorporating This Definition Changes the Relation Between T...supporting

confidence: 57%

“…Anticipating dimensional regularization and renormalization generally required for perturbative studies, we construct the propagator in general (complex) D spacetime dimensions. This work builds on earlier studies [1,2,3,4,5,6], which address some aspects of the problem how planar gravitational waves affect scalar fields. However, none of these works attempts to construct two-point functions and the corresponding Feynman propagator for massive scalar field in classical gravitational wave backgrounds, which is the main goal of this work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…The authors of Ref. [6] investigate the response of freely-falling and accelerating Unruh-DeWitt detectors in the presence of gravitational waves.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Scalar propagator for planar gravitational waves

Haasteren¹,

Prokopec²

2022

Preprint

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We construct the massive scalar propagator for planar gravitational wave backgrounds propagating on Minkowski space. We represent the propagator in terms of the Bessel's function of suitably deformed nonlocal distance functions, the deformation being caused by gravitational waves. We calculate the propagator both for nonpolarized, for the plus (+) and cross (×) polarized plane waves, as well as for more general planar waves in D spacetime dimensions. The propagator is useful for studying interactions of scalar fields on planar gravitational wave backgrounds in the context of interacting quantum fields, in which renormalization plays a crucial role. As simple applications of the propagator we calculate the one-loop effective action, the scalar mass generated by the scalar self-interaction term and the one-loop energy-momentum tensor, all renormalized by using dimensional regularization and renormalization. While the effective action and scalar mass remain unaffected by gravitational waves, the energy-momentum tensor exhibits flow of energy density in the direction of gravitational waves which grows quadratically with the scalar field mass, gravitational wave amplitude and its frequency.

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“…In particular in Refs. [1,6] the correct frequency poles were identified and Ref. [6] obtained similar results for the Jordan function (2.21).…”

Section: Incorporating This Definition Changes the Relation Between T...supporting

confidence: 57%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Scalar propagator for planar gravitational waves

Haasteren¹,

Prokopec²

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In this work we calculate the response of a freely falling Unruh-de Witt detector which couples to massless or massive scalar field fluctuating in the presence of planar gravitational waves propagating on Minkowski spacetime. This work builds on earlier studies [2,3,4,7,8,9,1], which address some aspects of the problem of how planar gravitational waves affect scalar fields. In particular the authors of Ref.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…In particular the authors of Ref. [9] investigate the response of freely-falling and accelerating Unruh-DeWitt detectors [10,11,12] in the presence of gravitational waves. In this work we generalize their analysis by using the propagator recently obtained in Ref.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gravitational wave signals in an Unruh-de Witt detector

Prokopec¹

2022

Preprint

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We firstly generalize the massive scalar propagator for gravitational waves propagating on Minkowski space obtained recently in Ref. [1]. We then use this propagator to study the response of a freely falling Unruh-de Witt detector to a gravitational wave backg round. We find that a freely falling detector completely cancels the effect of the deformation of the invariant distance induced by the gravitational waves, such that the only effect comes from an increased average size of scalar field vacuum fluctuations, the origin of which can be traced back to the change of the surface in which the gravitational waves fluctuate. When resummed over classical graviton insertions, gravitational waves generate cuts on the imaginary axis of the complex ∆τ -plane (where ∆τ = τ − τ denotes the difference of proper times), and the discontinuity accross these cuts is responsible for a continuum of energy transitions induced in the Unruh-de Witt detector. Not surprisingly, we find that the detector's transition rate is exponentially suppressed with increasing energy and the mass of the scalar field. What is surprising, however, is that the transition rate is nonanalytic function of the gravitational field strain. This means that, no matter how small is the gravitational field amplitude, expanding in powers of the gravitational field strain cannot approximate well the detector's transition rate. We present numerical and approximate analytical results for the detector's transition rate both for nonpolarized and for selected polarized monochromatic, unidirectional, gravitational waves.

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Entanglement harvesting for different gravitational wave burst profiles with and without memory

Barman,

Chakraborty,

Mukherjee

2023

J. High Energ. Phys.

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In the present article, we study how different gravitational wave (GW) burst profiles in linearized gravity, with and without the asymptotic memory, may influence the harvesting between two static Unruh-DeWitt detectors. To this end, we investigate the following burst profiles — Gaussian, sech-squared, Heaviside step function, and tanh. Out of these, the first two bursts contain no memory, while the latter two consist of a non-vanishing memory effect. We find that in all of these cases, entanglement harvesting is possible, and it decreases with the increasing distance between detectors and the detector transition energy. We observe that the harvesting differs qualitatively based on the presence or absence of the memory, which is prominent in a low transition energy regime. With memory, the harvesting keeps increasing with decreasing transition energy, while without memory, it tends to reach finite values. Furthermore, for the two burst profiles without memory, longer bursts correspond to greater harvesting in the low detector transition energy regime, and this characteristic is reversed for larger transition energy. Meanwhile, for the tanh-type profile with memory, harvesting is always greater for shorter bursts. We discuss various implications of our findings.

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Response of the Unruh-DeWitt detector in a gravitational wave background

Cited by 4 publications

References 22 publications

Scalar propagator for planar gravitational waves

Scalar propagator for planar gravitational waves

Gravitational wave signals in an Unruh-de Witt detector

Entanglement harvesting for different gravitational wave burst profiles with and without memory

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