arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Sandro S. Costa.
The purpose of this work is to show a possible reconciliation between Mach's principle and the Schwarzschild solution, using a description of this solution in terms of a new radial cooordinate related to the behaviour of Unruh detectors.
Park et al's recent comment (hep-th/9605132) that for detectors with large energy gap in comparison with the temperature of the background thermal bath, the maximum excitation rate is obtained for some non-zero detector's velocity is correct but was previously discussed by ourselves elsewhere, and moreover does not affect in our paper above any mathematical formula, numerical result, and consequently our final conclusion that the background thermal bath does not contribute substantially in the depolarization of electrons at LEP.
We investigate whether inertial thermometers moving in a thermal bath behave as being hotter or colder. This question is directly related to the classical controversy concerning how temperature transforms under Lorentz transformations. Rather than basing our arguments on thermodynamical hypotheses, we perform straightforward calculations in the context of relativistic quantum field theory. For this purpose we use Unruh-DeWitt detectors, since they have been shown to be reliable thermometers in semi-classical gravity. We believe that our discussion helps in definitely clarifying this issue.
We consider inertial and accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detectors moving in a background thermal bath and calculate their excitation rates. It is shown that for fast moving detectors such a thermal bath does not affect substantially the excitation probability. Our results are discussed in connection with a possible proposal of testing the Unruh effect in high energy particle accelerators.