Coherences of accelerated detectors and the local character of the Unruh effect

We study the locality of the acceleration temperature in the Unruh effect. To this end, we develop a new formalism for the modeling of macroscopic irreversible detectors. In particular, the formalism allows for the derivation of the higher-order coherence functions, analogous to the ones employed in quantum optics, that encode temporal fluctuations and correlations in particle detection. We derive a causal and approximately local-in-time expression for an Unruh-DeWitt detector moving in a general path in Minkowski spacetime. Moreover, we derive the second-order coherence function for uniformly accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detectors. We find that the fluctuations in detection time for a single Unruh-DeWitt detector are thermal. However, the correlations in detection time between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors with the same acceleration but separated by a finite distance are not thermal. This result suggests that the Unruh effect is fundamentally local, in the sense that the notion of acceleration temperature applies only to the properties of local field observables. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3679554]