Thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime and spontaneous excitation of atoms

Abstract

We consider, in de Sitter spacetime, both freely falling and static two-level atoms in interaction with a conformally coupled massless scalar field in the de Sitter-invariant vacuum, and separately calculate the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the atom's spontaneous excitation rate. We find that spontaneous excitations occur even for the freely falling atom as if there is a thermal bath of radiation at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature and we thus recover, in a different physical context, the results of Gibbons and Hawking that reveals the thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime. Similarly, for the case of the static atom, our results show that the atom also perceives a thermal bath which now arises as a result of the intrinsic thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime and the Unruh effect associated with the inherent acceleration of the atom.

arXiv comment11 pages

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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Quantum entanglement generation in de Sitter spacetime
• Entropic uncertainty relation in de Sitter space
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• Spontaneous excitation of a static atom in a thermal bath in cosmic string spacetime
• The Lamb shift in de Sitter spacetime
• Detecting the Curvature of de Sitter Universe with Two Entangled Atoms
• On the response of a particle detector in Anti-de Sitter spacetime
• Modification of energy shifts of atoms by the presence of a boundary in a thermal bath and the Casimir-Polder force
• Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated atom coupled with quantum fluctuations of spacetime
• Schrödinger equation in a general curved space-time geometry
• Trajectory of a massive localised wave function in a curved spacetime geometry