Thermal Casimir-Polder shifts in Rydberg atoms near metallic surfaces

Abstract

The Casimir-Polder (CP) potential and transition rates of a Rydberg atom above a plane metal surface at finite temperature are discussed. As an example, the CP potential and transition rates of a rubidium atom above a copper surface at room temperature is computed. Close to the surface we show that the quadrupole correction to the force is significant and increases with increasing principal quantum number n. For both the CP potential and decay rates one finds that the dominant contribution comes from the longest wavelength transition and the potential is independent of temperature. We provide explicit scaling laws for potential and decay rates as functions of atom-surface distance and principal quantum number of the initial Rydberg state.

Updated to journal version with corrected figures. 4 Pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Thermal Casimir vs Casimir-Polder forces: Equilibrium and non-equilibrium forces
• Temperature-invariant Casimir-Polder forces despite large thermal photon numbers

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