Abstract: It has been known for over 30 years that a uniformly linearly accelerated particle detector sees the Minkowski vacuum as a thermal bath in a temperature proportional the acceleration. In this talk we address the instantaneous transition rate of a pointlike detector in arbitrary motion. We discuss a regularisation of the problem by spatial smearing in Minkowski space and by temporal smearing in an arbitrary spacetime, showing that the latter gives a satisfactory control of the switch-on and switch-off effects and reduces to the former in the appropriate limit. As applications, we use the formalism to address the onset of thermality in linear acceleration in Minkowski space, and to estimate gravitational corrections to decay rates in atomic physics laboratory experiments.
Based on
http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0606067
http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0611067
http://arXiv.org/abs/0710.5671