UNIFORMLY ACCELERATED FINITE-TIME DETECTORS

The behavior of uniformly accelerated detectors in the Minkowski and R indler vacua is analyzed when the detector is coupled to a scalar fiel d during a finite amount of time T. We point out that the logarithmic ultraviolet divergences reported in the literature are due to the inst antaneous switching of the detector. We explicitly show this by consid ering a detector switched on and off continuously. The usual Planckian spectrum for the excitation probability is recovered in the limit T - -> infinity.