English

Rescuing the Unruh Effect in Lorentz Violating Gravity

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2025-04-23 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

While the robustness of Hawking radiation in the presence of UV Lorentz breaking is well-established, the Unruh effect has posed a challenge, with a large literature concluding that even the low-energy restoration of Lorentz invariance may not be sufficient to sustain this phenomenon. Notably, these previous studies have primarily focused on Lorentz-breaking matter on a conventional Rindler wedge. In this work, we demonstrate that considering the complete structure of Lorentz-breaking gravity, specifically the presence of a hypersurface orthogonal aether field, leads to the selection of a new Rindler wedge configuration characterized by a uniformly accelerated aether flow. This uniform acceleration provides a reference scale for comparison with the Lorentz-breaking one, thus ensuring the persistence of the Unruh effect in this context. We establish this by calculating the expected temperature using a Bogolubov approach, and by analyzing the response of a uniformly accelerated detector. We suggest that this resilience of the Unruh effect opens interesting possibilities towards future developments for using it as a tool to constrain Lorentz breaking theories of gravity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.03070,
  title  = {Rescuing the Unruh Effect in Lorentz Violating Gravity},
  author = {F. Del Porro and M. Herrero-Valea and S. Liberati and M. Schneider},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.03070},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

34 pages, 6 figures, identical with published version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:42:09.544Z