Understanding thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime via inter-detector interaction

Abstract

The seminar discovery by Gibbons and Hawking that a freely falling detector observes an isotropic background of thermal radiation reveals that de Sitter space is equivalent to a thermal bath at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature in Minkowski space, as far as the response rate of the detector is concerned. Meanwhile, for a static detector which is endowed with a proper acceleration with respect to the local freely-falling detectors, the temperature becomes the square root of the sum of the squared Gibbons-Hawking temperature and the squared Unruh temperature associated with the proper acceleration of the detector. Here, we demonstrate, by examining the interaction of two static detectors in the de Sitter invariant vacuum, that de Sitter space in regard to its thermal nature is unique on its own right in the sense that it is even neither equivalent to the thermal bath in Minkowski space when the static detectors become freely-falling nor to the Unruh thermal bath at the cosmological horizon where the Unruh effect dominates, insofar as the behavior of the inter-detector interaction in de Sitter space dramatically differs both from that in the Minkowski thermal bath and the Unruh thermal bath.