Spontaneous excitation of a static multilevel atom coupled with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations in Schwarzschild spacetime

Abstract

We study the spontaneous excitation of a radially polarized static multilevel atom outside a spherically symmetric black hole in multi-polar interaction with quantum electromagnetic fluctuations in the Boulware, Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacuum states. We find that spontaneous excitation does not occur in the Boulware vacuum, and, in contrast to the scalar field case, spontaneous emission rate is not well-behaved at the event horizon as result of the blow-up of the proper acceleration of the static atom. However, spontaneous excitation can take place both in the Unruh and the Hartle-Hawking vacua as if there were thermal radiation from the black hole. Distinctive features in contrast to the scalar field case are the existence of a term proportional to the proper acceleration squared in the rate of change of the mean atomic energy in the Unruh and the Hartle-Hawking vacuums and the structural similarity in the spontaneous excitation rate between the static atoms outside a black hole and uniformly accelerated ones in a flat space with a reflecting boundary, which is particularly dramatic at the event horizon where a complete equivalence exists.

21 pages, no figures

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• Entanglement dynamics for uniformly accelerated two-level atoms in the presence of a reflecting boundary
• Spontaneous excitation of an atom in a Kerr spacetime
• Local Description of Decoherence of Quantum Superpositions by Black Holes and Other Bodies
• Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated atom coupled with quantum fluctuations of spacetime
• Schrödinger equation in a general curved space-time geometry
• Dynamics of an elementary quantum system outside a radiating Schwarzschild black hole
• Atom-field dynamics in curved spacetime
• On Some Information-geometric aspects of Hawking radiation
• Trajectory of a massive localised wave function in a curved spacetime geometry
• Gravitational waves decohere quantum superpositions
• Spontaneous emission of a two-level static atom coupling with the electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations outside a high-dimensional Einstein Gauss-Bonnet black hole