Can a quantum circuit detect the Unruh effect?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24836v1
• Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2026 01:58:48 GMT
• Title: Can a quantum circuit detect the Unruh effect?
• Abstract summary: We propose and analyze a practical implementation of a detector using superconducting fluxonium circuits.<n>By modulating the excited-state transition frequency in Minkowski time, the detector accumulates a geometric phase associated with the timelike Unruh effect.<n>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.
• Score: 0.26097841018267615
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• 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.

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