Macroscopic aspects of the Unruh effect

Macroscopic concepts pertaining to the Unruh effect are elaborated and used to clarify its physical manifestations. Based on a description of the motion of accelerated, spatially extended laboratories in Minkowski space in terms of Poincare transformations, it is shown that, from a macroscopic perspective, an accelerated observer will not register with his measuring instruments any global thermal effects of acceleration in the inertial (Minkowskian) vacuum state. As is explained, this result is not in conflict with the well-known fact that microscopic probes used as thermometers respond non-trivially to acceleration if coupled to the vacuum. But this response cannot be interpreted as the effect of some exchange of thermal energy with a gas surrounding the observer; in fact, it is induced by the measuring process itself. It is also shown that genuine equilibrium states in a uniformly accelerated laboratory cannot be spatially homogeneous. In particular, these states coincide with the homogeneous inertial vacuum at sufficiently large distances from the horizon of the observer and consequently have the same (zero) temperature there. The analysis is carried out in the theory of a free massless scalar field; however the conclusion that the Unruh effect is not of a macroscopic thermal origin is generally valid.