Orateur
Description
After introducing the main ideas behind light-cone thermodynamics, I will explicitly express the Minkowski vacuum of a massless scalar field in terms of the particle notion associated with suitable spherical conformal killing fields. These fields are orthogonal to the light wavefronts originating from a sphere with a radius of rH in flat spacetime: a bifurcate conformal killing horizon that exhibits semiclassical features similar to those of black hole horizons and Cauchy horizons of non-extremal spherically symmetric black holes. Our result highlights the quantum aspects of this analogy and extends the well-known decomposition of the Minkowski vacuum in terms of Rindler modes, which are associated with the boost Killing field normal to a pair of null planes in Minkowski spacetime (the basis of the Unruh effect).