Spontaneous excitation of a uniformly accelerated atom coupled with vacuum Dirac field fluctuations

Abstract

We study the spontaneous excitation of a uniformly accelerated two-level atom non-linearly coupled with vacuum Dirac field fluctuations using the formalism proposed by Dalibard, Dupont-Roc and Cohen-Tannoudji (DDC) and generalized to the present case in the current paper. We find that a cross term involving both vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction appears, which is absent in the linear coupling cases such as an atom interacting with vacuum scalar or electromagnetic fluctuations. Furthermore, the contribution of this term actually dominates over that of radiation reaction. Thus, the mean rate of change of the atomic energy can no longer be distinctively separated into only the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction as in the scalar and electromagnetic cases where the coupling is linear. Our result shows that a uniformly accelerated atom interacting with vacuum Dirac fluctuations would spontaneously excite and a unique feature in sharp contrast to the scalar and electromagnetic cases is the appearance of a term in the excitation rate which is proportional to the quartic acceleration.

14 pages, no figures, typos corrected, version to appear in Phys. Rev. A

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• Dynamical behavior and geometric phase for a circularly accelerated two-level atom
• Interatomic interaction of two ground-state atoms in vacuum: contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction
• Response of a uniformly accelerated detector to massless Rarita-Schwinger fields in vacuum
• Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated atom coupled with quantum fluctuations of spacetime
• Fermionic condensate and the mean energy-momentum tensor in the Fulling-Rindler vacuum
• Probing long-range properties of vacuum altered by uniformly accelerating two spatially separated Unruh-DeWitt detectors
• Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect for accelerated two-level single and entangled atomic systems
• Atom-field dynamics in curved spacetime
• Single and entangled atomic systems in thermal bath and the Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect
• Spontaneous excitation of a centripetally accelerated atom coupled to electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations near a reflecting boundary
• Effects of acceleration on interatomic interactions
• Fermionic Casimir densities for a uniformly accelerating mirror in the Fulling-Rindler vacuum