Relationship between Hawking radiation from black holes and spontaneous excitation of atoms

Abstract

Using the formalism that separates the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the rate of change of the mean atomic energy, we show that a two-level atom in interaction with a quantum massless scalar field both in the Hartle-Hawking and Unruh vacuum in a 1+1 dimensional black hole background spontaneously excites as if there is thermal radiation at the Hawking temperature emanating from the black hole. Our calculation, therefore, ties the existence of Hawking radiation to the spontaneous excitation of a two-level atom placed in vacuum in the exterior of a black hole and shows pleasing consistence of two different physical phenomena, the Hawking radiation and the spontaneous excitation of atoms, which are quite prominent in their own right.

9 pages, no figures, typos corrected in the references, published version

References in corpus (8)

• Microscopic Origin of the Bekenstein-Hawking Entropy
• Hawking Radiation as Tunneling
• Relationship between Hawking Radiation and Gravitational Anomalies
• Anomalies, Hawking Radiations and Regularity in Rotating Black Holes
• Hawking Radiation from Charged Black Holes via Gauge and Gravitational Anomalies
• Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated atom: The contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction
• Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated hydrogen atom coupled with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations
• Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated atom in a spacetime with a reflecting plane boundary

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Do static atoms outside a Schwarzschild black hole spontaneously excite?
• Understanding Hawking radiation in the framework of open quantum systems
• Spontaneous excitation of a uniformly accelerated atom coupled with vacuum Dirac field fluctuations
• Radiative processes of two entangled atoms outside a Schwarzschild black hole
• Spontaneous excitation of a static atom in a thermal bath in cosmic string spacetime
• Spontaneous excitation of a static multilevel atom coupled with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations in Schwarzschild spacetime
• Radiative process of two entanglement atoms in de Sitter spacetime
• Entanglement generation outside a Schwarzschild black hole and the Hawking effect
• Thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime and spontaneous excitation of atoms
• Boundarylike behaviors of the resonance interatomic energy in a cosmic string spacetime
• Spontaneous excitation of an atom in a Kerr spacetime
• Lamb Shift for static atoms outside a Schwarzschild black hole
• Modification of energy shifts of atoms by the presence of a boundary in a thermal bath and the Casimir-Polder force
• Higher Derivative Correction to the Hawking Flux via Trace Anomaly
• Dynamics of an elementary quantum system outside a radiating Schwarzschild black hole
• Atom-field dynamics in curved spacetime