We examine an Unruh-DeWitt particle detector that is coupled linearly to the scalar density of a massless Dirac field in Minkowski spacetimes of dimension d ≥ 2 and on the static Minkowski cylinder in spacetime dimension two, allowing the detector's motion to remain arbitrary and working to leading order in perturbation theory. In d-dimensional Minkowski, with the field in the usual Fock vacuum, we show that the detector's response is identical to that of a detector coupled linearly to a massless scalar field in 2d-dimensional Minkowski. In the special case of uniform linear acceleration, the detector's response hence exhibits the Unruh effect with a Planckian factor in both even and odd dimensions, in contrast to the Rindler power spectrum of the Dirac field, which has a Planckian factor for odd d but a Fermi-Dirac factor for even d. On the two-dimensional cylinder, we set the oscillator modes in the usual Fock vacuum but allow an arbitrary state for the zero mode of the periodic spinor. We show that the detector's response distinguishes the periodic and antiperiodic spin structures, and the zero mode of the periodic spinor contributes to the response by a state-dependent but well defined amount. Explicit analytic and numerical results on the cylinder are obtained for inertial and uniformly accelerated trajectories, recovering the d = 2 Minkowski results in the limit of large circumference. The detector's response has no infrared ambiguity for d = 2, neither in Minkowski nor on the cylinder.

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We examine an Unruh-DeWitt particle detector which couples linearly to the scalar density of a massless Dirac field on the static cylindrical quotient of the (1+1)-dimensional Minkowski spacetime, allowing the detector's motion to remain arbitrary and working to leading order in perturbation theory. We show that the detector's response distinguishes the periodic and antiperiodic spin structures, and the zero mode that is present for periodic spinors contributes to the response by a state-dependent but well defined and controllable amount.

We examine a quantised massive scalar field in (1 + 1)-dimensional spatially compact cosmological spacetimes in which the early time and late time expansion laws provide distinguished definitions of Fock "in" and "out" vacua, with the possible exception of the spatially constant sector, which may become effectively massless at early or late times. We show, generalising the work of Ford and Pathinayake, that when such a massive zero mode occurs, the freedom in the respective "in" and "out" states is a family with two real parameters. As an application, we consider massive untwisted and twisted scalar fields in the (1 + 1)dimensional spatially compact Milne spacetime, where the untwisted field has a massive "in" zero mode. We demonstrate, by a combination of analytic and numerical methods, that the choice of the massive "in" zero mode state has a significant effect on the response of an inertial Unruh-DeWitt detector, especially in the excitation part of the spectrum. The detector's peculiar velocity with respect to comoving cosmological observers has the strongest effect in the "in" vacuum of the untwisted field, where it shifts the excitation and de-excitation resonances towards higher values of the detector's energy gap.