Dirac vacuum: Acceleration and external-field effects

Abstract

The quantization of the massive spin-\textonehalf{} field in Rindler coordinates is considered, including the effects of a background magnetic field. We calculate the expectation values of conserved quantities such as the stress-energy tensor, current density, and spin distribution, as detected by an accelerated observer. The ratio of the energy and particle densities is given by a Fermi-Dirac distribution, but the spectrum of these quantities takes in general a complicated form that cannot be simply interpreted as a thermal spectrum. For the free-particle case the spectrum of the energy-stress tensor has a Fermi-Dirac form only in the massless limit. In the presence of the magnetic field the Dirac vacuum is magnetized and exhibits plasmalike properties.