Simplified derivation of the Hawking-Unruh temperature for an accelerated observer in vacuum

摘要

A detector undergoing uniform acceleration a in a vacuum field responds as though it were immersed in thermal radiation of temperature T= ha/2pikc. An intuitive derivation of this result is given for a scalar field in one spatial dimension. The approach is extended to the case where the field detected by the accelerated observer is a spin 1/2 Dirac field. (C) 2004 American Association of Physics Teachers.