Quantum Fluctuations and the Unruh effect in strongly-coupled conformal field theories

Through the AdS/CFT correspondence, we study a uniformly accelerated quark in the vacuum of strongly-coupled conformal field theories in various dimensions, and determine the resulting stochastic fluctuations of the quark trajectory. From the perspective of an inertial observer, these are quantum fl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The journal of high energy physics 2010-06, Vol.2010 (6), Article 78
Main Authors: Cáceres, Elena, Chernicoff, Mariano, Güijosa, Alberto, Pedraza, Juan F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acceleration
Brownian motion
Classical and Quantum Gravitation
Elementary Particles
Field theory
High energy physics
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Quantum Field Theories
Quantum Field Theory
Quantum Physics
Quarks
Radiation effects
Relativity Theory
String Theory
Tensors
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Summary:Through the AdS/CFT correspondence, we study a uniformly accelerated quark in the vacuum of strongly-coupled conformal field theories in various dimensions, and determine the resulting stochastic fluctuations of the quark trajectory. From the perspective of an inertial observer, these are quantum fluctuations induced by the gluonic radiation emitted by the accelerated quark. From the point of view of the quark itself, they originate from the thermal medium predicted by the Unruh effect. We scrutinize the relation between these two descriptions in the gravity side of the correspondence, and show in particular that upon transforming the conformal field theory from Rindler space to the open Einstein universe, the acceleration horizon disappears from the boundary theory but is preserved in the bulk. This transformation allows us to directly connect our calculation of radiation-induced fluctuations in vacuum with the analysis by de Boer et al. of the Brownian motion of a quark that is on average static within a thermal medium. Combining this same bulk transformation with previous results of Emparan, we are also able to compute the stress-energy tensor of the Unruh thermal medium.
ISSN:1029-8479
1029-8479
DOI:10.1007/JHEP06(2010)078