Late-time quantum radiation by a uniformly accelerated detector in de Sitter spacetime

Abstract

We investigate the quantum radiation emitted by a uniformly accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detector in de Sitter spacetime. We find that there exists a nonvanishing quantum radiation at late times in the radiation zone of the conformally flat coordinates, which cover the region behind the cosmological horizon for the accelerated detector. The theoretical structure of producing the late-time quantum radiation is similar to that of the same model in Minkowski spacetime: it comes from a nonlocal correlation of the quantum field in the Bunch-Davies vacuum state, which can be traced back to the entanglement between the field modes defined in different regions in de Sitter spacetime.