Superluminal dispersion relations and the Unruh effect

In the context of quantum gravity phenomenology, we study the Unruh effect in the presence of superluminal dispersion relations. In particular, we estimate the response function and the probability rate for an accelerated detector coupled to a massless scalar field, whose dispersion relation becomes essentially quadratic beyond a threshold momentum kp. By means of a perturbative analysis, we show that superluminal dispersion induces a correction to the Planckian spectrum, which tends to vanish as kp increases. © 2008 The American Physical Society.