General covariance, accelerated frames and the particle concept

Abstract

The definition of particle states in various accelerated frames is considered. It is shown that in any realistically accelerated system, quantum field theory can be formulated without any ambiguity. We further show that the definition of a particle based on Green's function techniques does not always agree with the definition based on explicit quantization. We analyse the standard accelerated detector results from this point of view and show that the uncertainty principle imposes a rigorous bound on these detection processes.