Position dependent energy level shifts of an accelerated atom in the presence of a boundary

Abstract

We consider a uniformly accelerated atom interacting with a vacuum electromagnetic field in the presence of an infinite conducting plane boundary and calculate separately the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the atomic energy level shift. We analyze in detail the behavior of the total energy shift in three different regimes of the distance in both the low acceleration and high acceleration limits. Our results show that, in general, an accelerated atom does not behave as if immersed in a thermal bath at the Unruh temperature in terms of the atomic energy level shifts, and the effect of the acceleration on the atomic energy level shifts may in principle become appreciable in certain circumstances, although it may not be realistic for actual experimental measurements. We also examine the effects of the acceleration on the level shifts when the acceleration is of the order of the transition frequency of the atom and we find some features differ from what was obtained in the existing literature.

26 pages, 6 figures, version published in PRA

References in corpus (6)

• New asymptotic behaviour of the surface-atom force out of thermal equilibrium
• Thermal Casimir vs Casimir-Polder forces: Equilibrium and non-equilibrium forces
• 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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Cited by in corpus (2)

• The Lamb shift in de Sitter spacetime
• Lamb Shift for static atoms outside a Schwarzschild black hole