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Emergence of Unruh prethermalization for uniformly accelerating many-atom system

Saptarshi Saha1,2,*, Chiranjeeb Singha3,†, Pragna Das4,5,‡, and Arpan Chatterjee1,6,§

  • *Contact author: s.saha@tu-berlin.de
  • †Contact author: chiranjeeb.singha@iucaa.in
  • ‡Contact author: Pragna.Das@ijs.si
  • §Contact author: arpanchatterjee@ufscar.br
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 065011 – Published 17 March, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/nq1q-3md9

Abstract

A uniformly accelerated atom in an inertial vacuum generally thermalizes to a Gibbs state, which is known as the Unruh effect. In contrast, for a noninteracting many-body system coupled to a common massless scalar field, we find that thermalization proceeds in multiple stages: the system first attains a prethermal generalized Gibbs state, before eventual relaxation to the thermal Gibbs state. The prethermal state is protected by emergent conserved quantities; hence, the system behaves like a nearly integrable one, which shows a sharp distinction from the Unruh effect. We coin the term “Unruh prethermalization” to characterize this phenomenon. The measure of entanglement is a good estimation of the lifetime of the prethermal state and is consistent with previous studies. Finally, we show that in such a regime, the dynamics show a Dicke superradiance-type radiation burst before reaching the prethermal state. In contrast, only a monoexponential decay is observed for Unruh thermalization. In addition, to highlight the significance of our results, we compare them with existing experimental observations.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 065011– Published 17 March, 2026
  • Received 12 September 2025
  • Accepted 27 February 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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