Can a quantum circuit detect the Unruh effect?

Quantum Physics arXiv:2607.24836 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 24 Jul 2026] Title:Can a quantum circuit detect the Unruh effect? Authors:Pravin Kumar Dahal, Timothy C. Ralph, William J. Munro, Arkady Fedorov, James Q. Quach View a PDF of the paper titled Can a quantum circuit detect the Unruh effect?, by Pravin Kumar Dahal and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) 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 $\Lambda$-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: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) Cite as: arXiv:2607.24836 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2607.24836v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.24836 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Pravin Dahal [view email] [v1] Fri, 24 Jul 2026 01:58:48 UTC (137 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Can a quantum circuit detect the Unruh effect?, by Pravin Kumar Dahal and 3 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-07 Change to browse by: gr-qc hep-th References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)