On the Unruh effect, trajectories and information

Abstract We calculate the trajectories which maximize the Unruh effect, mode by mode, when given a fixed energy budget for acceleration. We find that Unruh processes are most likely to occur, and therefore are potentially best observable, for certain trajectories whose acceleration is not uniform. In practice, the precise form of optimal trajectories depends on experimental bounds on how fast the acceleration can be changed. We also show that the Unruh spectra of arbitrarily accelerated observers contain the complete information to reconstruct the observers’ trajectories.