2026/07/24 by Pravin Kumar Dahal, Timothy C. Ralph, William J. Munro +2
#quant-ph #gr-qc #hep-th
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 ∼ 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.