In analyzing the nature of thermal radiance experienced by an accelerated observer (Unruh effect), an eternal black hole (Hawking effect) and in certain types of cosmological expansion, one of us proposed a unifying viewpoint that these can be understood as arising from the vacuum fluctuations of the quantum field being subjected to an exponential scale transformation in these systems. This viewpoint, together with our recently developed stochastic theory of particle-field interaction understood as quantum open systems described by the influence functional formalism, can be used effectively to address situations where the spacetime possesses an event horizon only asymptotically, or none at all. Examples studied here include detectors moving at uniform acceleration only asymptotically or for a finite time, a moving mirror, and a two-dimensional collapsing mass. We show that in such systems radiance indeed is observed, albeit not in a precise Planckian spectrum. The deviation therefrom is determined by a parameter which measures the departure from uniform acceleration or from exact exponential expansion. These results are expected to be useful for the investigation of non-equilibrium black hole thermodynamics and the linear response regime of backreaction problems in semiclassical gravity.

We define the entropy S and uncertainty function of a squeezed system interacting with a thermal bath, and study how they change in time by following the evolution of the reduced density matrix in the influence functional formalism. As examples, we calculate the entropy of two exactly solvable squeezed systems: an inverted harmonic oscillator and a scalar field mode evolving in an inflationary universe. For the inverted oscillator with weak coupling to the bath, at both high and low temperatures, S → r, where r is the squeeze parameter. In the de Sitter case, at high temperatures, S → (1 − c)r where c = γ 0 /H, γ 0 being the coupling to the bath and H the Hubble constant. These three cases confirm previous results based on more ad hoc prescriptions for calculating entropy. But at low temperatures, the de Sitter entropy S → (1/2 − c)r is noticeably different. This result, obtained from a more rigorous approach, shows that factors usually ignored by the conventional approaches, i.e., the nature of the environment and the coupling strength betwen the system and the environment, are important.

No abstract

No abstract

The stochastic method based on the influence functional formalism introduced in an earlier paper to treat particle creation in near-uniformly accelerated detectors and collapsing masses is applied here to treat thermal and near-thermal radiance in certain types of cosmological expansions. It is indicated how the appearance of thermal radiance in different cosmological spacetimes and in the two apparently distinct classes of black hole and cosmological spacetimes can be understood under a unifying conceptual and methodological framework.