Probing Unruh Effect from Enhanced Decoherence

Abstract

We investigate the decoherence of an Unruh-DeWitt detector coupled to scalar, electromagnetic, and spinor fields in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. By employing the Schwinger-Keldysh influence functional formalism, we derive a universal scaling law relating the decoherence rate to the proper acceleration $a$ and the scaling dimension $Δ$ of the environmental field operator. By analyzing both sharp (top-hat) and smooth Gaussian switching functions, it is shown that the decoherence rate in the asymptotic long-time limit scales as $a^{2Δ-1}$. This scaling indicates that increasing scaling dimension of the coupling field operators can significantly enhance the decoherence, thereby providing a more sensitive probe of the Unruh effect.