Thermal property in Brownian motion of a particle coupled to vacuum fluctuations

Abstract

We investigate Brownian motions of a particle coupled to vacuum fluctuations of a quantum field. The Unruh effect predicts that an observer in an accelerated motion sees the Minkowski vacuum as thermally excited. This addresses the problem of whether a thermal property appears in a perturbative random motion of a particle in an accelerated motion due to the coupling or not. We revisit this problem by solving the equation of motion of a particle coupled to vacuum fluctuations including the radiation reaction force. We compute a Fourier integral for the variance of the random velocity in a rigorous manner. Similarly, we consider a particle coupled to vacuum fluctuations in de Sitter spacetime motivated by the argument that an observer in de Sitter spacetime sees the Bunch-Davies vacuum as a thermally excited state with the Gibbons-Hawking temperature. Our investigation clarifies the condition that the energy equipartition relation arises in the Brownian motions of a particle.