Consistent Histories Approach to the Unruh Effect

Abstract

Using the history projection operator (HPO) approach to consistent histories we rederive Unruh's result that an observer constantly accelerating through the Minkowski vacuum appears to be immersed in a thermal bath. We show that propositions about any symmetry of a system always form a consistent set and that the probabilities associated with such propositions are decided by their value in the initial state. We use this fact to postulate a condition on the decoherence functional in the HPO setup. Finally we show that the Unruh effect arises from the fact that the initial density matrix corresponding to the inertial vacuum can be written as a thermal density matrix in the Fock basis associated with the accelerating observer.