Using Berry’s Phase to Detect the Unruh Effect at Lower Accelerations

We show that a detector acquires a Berry phase due to its motion in spacetime. The phase is different in the inertial and accelerated case as a direct consequence of the Unruh effect. We exploit this fact to design a novel method to measure the Unruh effect. Surprisingly, the effect is detectable for accelerations ${10}^9$ times smaller than previous proposals sustained only for times of nanoseconds.

Figure 1

Trajectories for an inertial and accelerated detector.

Figure 2

$\delta$ for each cycle as a function of the acceleration for three different scenarios. First scenario (top): ${\Omega }_a\simeq 2.0\mathrm{GHz}$, ${\Omega }_b\simeq 2.0\mathrm{GHz}$, and $\lambda \simeq 34\mathrm{Hz}$. Second scenario (middle): ${\Omega }_a\simeq 2.0\mathrm{GHz}$, ${\Omega }_b\simeq 2.0\mathrm{GHz}$, and $\lambda \simeq 0.10\mathrm{KHz}$. Third scenario (bottom): ${\Omega }_a\simeq 2.0\mathrm{GHz}$, ${\Omega }_b\simeq 2.0\mathrm{GHz}$, and $\lambda \simeq 0.25\mathrm{KHz}$.