Field quantization in rotating frames: coordinate covariance and the circular-detector response

Abstract

We provide a unified analysis of scalar-field quantization and detector response in relativistic rotating frames, comparing rigid and Trocheris-Takeno (TT) descriptions in unbounded Minkowski spacetime. We distinguish three questions that are often conflated: (i) how a fixed quantum state is represented in rotating coordinates, (ii) whether rotating time evolution selects a global ground state, and (iii) how a rotating detector responds to the vacuum. Coordinate-transformed rigid and TT modes span the same positive-frequency subspace as inertial modes: their Bogoliubov beta coefficients vanish and their mode sums reproduce the Minkowski Wightman function. Neither rotating time flow selects a global scalar ground state, although for different reasons: the rigid generator is not globally timelike and is unbounded below, whereas TT time translation is not a Killing symmetry. Nevertheless, a circular Unruh-DeWitt detector in the Minkowski vacuum has a stationary, nonzero response. We relate this response to negative corotating frequencies, evaluate it after an explicit Hadamard subtraction, and show that it is nonthermal. Thus vanishing Bogoliubov mixing, the absence of a symmetry-selected rotating vacuum, and detector excitation are mutually consistent.