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Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2023

Light-cone thermodynamics: purification of the Minkowski vacuum

Résumé

We explicitly express the Minkowski vacuum of a massless scalar field in terms of the particle notion associated with suitable spherical conformal killing fields. These fields are orthogonal to the light wavefronts originating from a sphere with a radius of $r_H$ in flat spacetime: a bifurcate conformal killing horizon that exhibits semiclassical features similar to those of black hole horizons and Cauchy horizons of non-extremal spherically symmetric black holes. Our result highlights the quantum aspects of this analogy and extends the well-known decomposition of the Minkowski vacuum in terms of Rindler modes, which are associated with the boost Killing field normal to a pair of null planes in Minkowski spacetime (the basis of the Unruh effect). While some features of our result have been established by Kay and Wald's theorems in the 90s -- on quantum field theory in stationary spacetimes with bifurcate Killing horizons -- the added value we provide here lies in the explicit expression of the vacuum.

Dates et versions

hal-04179163 , version 1 (09-08-2023)

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Alejandro Perez, Salvatore Ribisi. Light-cone thermodynamics: purification of the Minkowski vacuum. 2023. ⟨hal-04179163⟩
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