Detecting modified vacuum fluctuations due to presence of a boundary by means of the geometric phase
arXiv:1212.2695 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.86.064103
Abstract
We study the geometric phase acquired by an inertial atom whose trajectories are parallel to a reflecting boundary due its coupling to vacuum fluctuations of electromagnetic fields, by treating the atom as an open quantum system in a bath of the fluctuating vacuum fields, and show that the phase is position dependent as a result of the presence of the boundary which modifies the field quantum fluctuations. Our result therefore suggests a possible way of detecting vacuum fluctuations in experiments involving geometric phase.
13 pages, 1 figure, to appear in PRA. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1203.5869
References in corpus (10)
- An experimental observation of geometric phases for mixed states using NMR interferometry
- Measurement of geometric phase for mixed states using single photon interferometry
- Geometric phases in open systems: an exact model to study how they are corrected by decoherence
- Geometric phase with nonunitary evolution in presence of a quantum critical bath
- Vacuum fluctuations and Brownian motion of a charged test particle near a reflecting boundary
- Geometric phase distributions for open quantum systems
- Geometric phase for an accelerated two-level atom and the Unruh effect
- Open quantum system approach to Gibbons-Hawking effect of de Sitter space-time
- Brownian motion of a charged test particle near a reflecting boundary at finite temperature
- Brownian motion of a charged test particle driven by vacuum fluctuations near a dielectric half-space