Unruh detectors, Feynman diagrams, acceleration and decay

Abstract

We present a method for relating the transition rate of an accelerated Unruh-deWitt detector to the rate of the same detector when stationary in Minkowski space. Furthermore, we show that when using the detector as a model for decay, its transition rate can be related directly to the decay rate obtained from QFT. Combined this provides a straightforward method for calculating the decay rate of accelerated particles to first order in the coupling constants.

Comments: 16+5 pages, 2 figures v2: Corrected derivation in section 5.1