=

The passage around this formula

The detector, not the mode decomposition, is the object this article works with, for a reason that matters later: a detector’s response is what an experiment can actually report, while “the Bogoliubov coefficients of the 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…

Read this part in the article →