Do static atoms outside a Schwarzschild black hole spontaneously excite?

Abstract

The spontaneous excitation of a two-level atom held static outside a four dimensional Schwarzschild black hole and in interaction with a massless scalar field in the Boulware, Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacuum is investigated and the contributions of the vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the rate of change of the mean atomic energy are calculated separately. We find that for the Boulware vacuum, the spontaneous excitation does not occur and the ground state atoms are stable, while the spontaneous emission rate for excited atoms in the Boulware vacuum, which is well-behaved at the event horizon, is not the same as that in the usual Minkowski vacuum. However, both for the Unruh vacuum and the Hartle-Hawking vacuum, our results show that the atom would spontaneously excite, as if there were an outgoing thermal flux of radiation or as if it were in a thermal bath of radiation at a proper temperature which reduces to the Hawking temperature in the spatial asymptotic region, depending on whether the scalar field is in the Unruh or Hartle-Hawking vacuum.

15 pages, no figures, to be published in PRD

References in corpus (6)

• 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 absorption of an accelerated hydrogen atom near a conducting plane in vacuum
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• 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
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• Schrödinger equation in a general curved space-time geometry
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• Spontaneous excitation of a centripetally accelerated atom coupled to electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations near a reflecting boundary
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• Trajectory of a massive localised wave function in a curved spacetime geometry