Selective Thermalization, Chiral Excitations, and a Case of Quantum Hair in the Presence of Event Horizons

Abstract

The Unruh effect is a well-understood phenomenon, where one considers a vacuum state of a quantum field in Minkowski spacetime, which appears to be thermally populated for a uniformly accelerating Rindler observer. In this article, we derive a variant of the Unruh effect involving two distinct accelerating observers and aim to address the following questions: (i) Is it possible to selectively thermalize a subset of momentum modes for the case of massless scalar fields, and (ii) Is it possible to excite only the left-handed massless fermions while keeping right-handed fermions in a vacuum state or vice versa? To this end, we consider a Rindler wedge $R_1$ constructed from a class of accelerating observers and another Rindler wedge $R_2$ (with $R_2 \subset R_1$) constructed from another class of accelerating observers such that the wedge $R_2$ is displaced along a null direction w.r.t $R_1$ by a parameter $\Delta$. By first considering a massless scalar field in the $R_1$ vacuum, we show that if we choose the displacement $\Delta$ along one null direction, the positive momentum modes are thermalized, whereas negative momentum modes remain in vacuum (and vice versa if we choose the displacement along the other null direction). We then consider a massless fermionic field in a vacuum state in $R_1$ and show that the reduced state in $R_2$ is such that the left-handed fermions are excited and are thermal for large frequencies. In contrast, the right-handed fermions have negligible particle density and vice versa. We argue that the toy models involving shifted Rindler spacetime may provide insights into the particle excitation aspects of evolving horizons and the possibility of Rindler spacetime having a quantum strand of hair. Additionally, based on our work, we hypothesize that massless fermions underwent selective chiral excitations during the radiation-dominated era of cosmology.