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arXiv:2607.24836

Can a quantum circuit detect the Unruh effect?

Pravin Kumar Dahal, Timothy C. Ralph, William J. Munro, Arkady Fedorov, James Q. Quach

quant-phgr-qchep-thSubmitted Jul 24, 2026• Announced Jul 27, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

The Unruh effect predicts that an accelerating observer perceives the Minkowski vacuum as a thermal bath, yet direct detection remains experimentally inaccessible. Its timelike counterpart, arising from the entanglement of massless fields between the future and past light cones, offers a more feasible route but requires a detector whose transition frequency follows a specific conformal-time scaling. We propose and analyze a practical implementation of such a detector using superconducting fluxonium circuits, which naturally provide two quasi-degenerate ground states and a tunable excited state, forming an effective $Λ$-system. By modulating the excited-state transition frequency in Minkowski time, the detector accumulates a geometric phase associated with the timelike Unruh effect. Open-system simulations predict $\sim 10\%$ shift in the ground-state population within $530$ ns, representing a three-order-of-magnitude sensitivity enhancement over two-level Unruh-DeWitt detectors. These results establish a realistic quantum-circuit platform for experimentally probing the timelike Unruh effect and, more broadly, for testing fundamental nature of quantum fields using engineered quantum systems.

Comments
11 pages, 4 figures; Comments Welcome!

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The Unruh effect predicts that an accelerating observer perceives the Minkowski vacuum as a thermal bath, yet direct detection remains experimentally inaccessible. Its timelike counterpart, arising from the entanglement of massless fields between the future and past light cones, offers a more feasible route but requires a detector whose transition frequency follows a specific conformal-time scaling. We propose and analyze a practical implementation of such a detector using superconducting fluxonium circuits, which naturally provide two quasi-degenerate ground states and a tunable excited state, forming an effective ΛΛΛ-system. By modulating the excited-state transition frequency in Minkowski time, the detector accumulates a geometric phase associated with the timelike Unruh effect. Open-system simulations predict ∼10%\sim 10\%∼10% shift in the ground-state population within 530530530 ns, representing a three-order-of-magnitude sensitivity enhancement over two-level Unruh-DeWitt detectors. These results establish a realistic quantum-circuit platform for experimentally probing the timelike Unruh effect and, more broadly, for testing fundamental nature of quantum fields using engineered quantum systems.
While the Unruh effect has traditionally been studied under the assumption of uniform acceleration, a simplification motivated by experimental considerations, it is not necessarily true for all non-inertial motions. We propose a novel approach for the indirect detection of the Unruh effect without relying on the former restriction. Previous studies have shown that probing the decoherence of an Unruh-DeWitt detector can significantly reduce the acceleration required for observing the effect by several orders of magnitude compared to earlier proposals. Building on this idea, we develop a theoretical framework describing a non-inertial observer equipped with a detector undergoing non-uniform, time-dependent acceleration. We show that, in a non-uniformly accelerated Rindler spacetime, the particle distribution perceived in the Minkowski vacuum acquires a time-dependent modification of the standard Unruh spectrum. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the inclusion of quantum entanglement leads to a deformation of the Minkowski vacuum into squeezed states.
The Unruh effect can not only arise out of the entanglement between modes of left and right Rindler wedges, but also between modes of future and past light cones. We explore the geometric phase resulting from this timelike entanglement between the future and past, showing that it can be captured in a simple Λ system. This provides an alternative paradigm to the Unruh-deWitt detector. The Unruh effect has not been experimentally verified because the accelerations needed to excite a response from Unruh-deWitt detectors are prohibitively large. We demonstrate that a stationary but time-dependent Λ-system detects the timelike Unruh effect with current technology.
Abstract Detecting the Unruh effect is a major challenge in fundamental physics. It is known that exciting massive fields with the Unruh thermal bath is heavily suppressed when the field’s rest energy is much larger than the acceleration energy scale, M c 2 ≫ ℏ a / c . However, the standard literature lacks an explicit quantitative derivation of this suppression. In this work, we first fill this gap by deriving the exponential suppression, ∼ exp ⁡ ( − constant × M c 2 / ( ℏ a / c ) ) , in two different frameworks: a (3+1)-dimensional Unruh–deWitt detector and a (1+1)-dimensional cavity QED setup. This shows the suppression is universal and sets an insurmountable barrier for any detection method that relies on exciting massive fields. For an electron-mass field at achievable accelerations ( a ∼ 10 20 m s −2 ), the suppression exceeds 10 9 orders of magnitude. To avoid this suppression, the field’s rest energy must be less than or of the order of the acceleration energy scale, M c 2 ≲ ℏ a / c . Achieving this condition, however, requires astronomically high accelerations. For example, detecting the effect for an electron-mass field would require accelerations of a ≳ 4.6 × 10 29 m s −2 , which is far beyond experimental reach. While using a massless field avoids this suppression, we show the best strategy is not to avoid mass, but to engineer a small effective mass that satisfies the optimal condition ℏ a / c ≫ M eff c 2 . We propose a concrete implementation using a superconducting circuit with a Josephson persistent-current qubit (the analog of a UdW detector) coupled to a microwave resonator (the analog of the scalar field). For this system, the optimal condition is 2 I p ΔΦ ≫ Δ , where I p is the persistent current, Δ Φ is the magnetic flux swing, and Δ is the qubit’s tunneling energy gap. For a fixed experimental setup
The Unruh effect can not only arise out of the entanglement between modes of left and right Rindler wedges, but also between modes of future and past light cones. We explore the geometric phase resulting from this timelike entanglement between the future and past, showing that it can be captured in a simple Λ\LambdaΛ-system. This provides an alternative paradigm to the Unruh-deWitt detector. The Unruh effect has not been experimentally verified because the accelerations needed to excite a response from Unruh-deWitt detectors are prohibitively large. We demonstrate that a stationary but time-dependent Λ\LambdaΛ-system detects the timelike Unruh effect with current technology.
Abstract We study, in the framework of open quantum systems, the entanglement dynamics for a quantum system composed of two uniformly accelerated Unruh-Dewitt detectors interacting with a bath of massive scalar fields in the Minkowski vacuum. We find that the entanglement evolution for the quantum system coupled with massive fields is always slower compared with that of the one coupled with massless fields, and this time-delay effect brought about by the field being massive can however be counteracted by a large enough acceleration, in contrast to the case of a static quantum system in a thermal bath, where this time delay is not affected by the temperature. Remarkably, the maximal concurrence of the quantum system generated during evolution may increase with acceleration for any inter-detector separation while that for static ones in a thermal bath decreases monotonically with temperature, and this can be considered as an anti-Unruh effect in terms of the entanglement generated.
Abstract It is found that the Unruh effect can not only arise out of the entanglement between two sets of modes spanning the left and right Rindler wedges, but also between modes spanning the future and past light cones. Furthermore, an inertial Unruh–DeWitt detector along a spacetime trajectory in one of these cones may exhibit the same thermal response to the vacuum as that of an accelerated detector confined in the Rindler wedge. This feature thus could be an alternative candidate to verify the “Unruh effect”, termed as the timelike Unruh effect correspondingly. In this paper we propose to detect the timelike Unruh effect by using an impurity immersed in a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC). The impurity acts as the detector which interacts with the density fluctuations in the condensate, working as an effective quantum field. Following the paradigm of the emerging field ofquantum thermometry, we combine quantum parameter estimation theory with the theory of open quantum systems to realize a nondemolition Unruh temperature measurement in the nanokelvin ( nK\textrm{nK}nK nK ) regime. Our results demonstrate that the timelike Unruh effect can be probed using a stationary two-level impurity with time-dependent energy gap immersed in a BEC within current technologies.