Symbol τ

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…true vacuum” is not the kind of thing any apparatus reads off a dial. The response functional for a pointlike, linearly coupled two-level (Unruh-DeWitt) detector on worldline x($\tau$) , parametrized by its own proper time $\tau$ , with energy gap $\Omega$ and switching function $\chi(\tau)$ controlling when the interaction is on, is $\mathcal F_x(\Omega) = \int d\tau\, d\tau'\, \chi(\tau)\chi(\tau')\, e^{-i\Omega(\tau-\tau')}\, W\big[x(\tau), x(\tau')\big]$. where W is the field’s two-point Wightman function evaluated along the trajectory [ 5 ] . Three things in this expression are worth fixing in the reader’s mind before…

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