Title: Decoherence as a detector of the Unruh effect
Abstract: We propose a type of the Unruh-DeWitt detector which measures the decoherence of the reduced density matrix of the detector interacting with the massless quantum scalar field. We find that the decoherence decay rates are different in the inertial and accelerated reference frames. We show that the exponential phase decay can be observed for relatively low accelerations, that can significantly improve the conditions for measuring the Unruh effect.Received 10 March 2020Revised 9 June 2020Accepted 27 October 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.043230Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasEntanglement in field theoryQuantum fields in curved spacetimeUnruh effectGravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics