Distinguishing de Sitter universe from thermal Minkowski spacetime by Casimir-Polder-like force

Abstract

We demonstrate that the static ground state atom, which interacts with a conformally coupled massless scalar field in the de Sitter invariant vacuum, can obtain a position-dependent energy-level shift and this shift could cause a Casimir-Polder-like force on it. Interestingly no such force arises on the inertial atom bathed in a thermal radiation in the Minkowski universe. Thus, although the energy-level shifts of the static atom for these two cases are structurally the same, whether the energy-level shift causes the Casimir-Polder-like force, in principle, could be as an indicator to distinguish de Sitter universe from the thermal Minkowski spacetime.

11 pages

References in corpus (1)

• Loss of Spin Entanglement For Accelerated Electrons in Electric and Magnetic Fields

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Genuine tripartite nonlocality and entanglement in curved spacetime
• Hawking effect can generate physically inaccessible genuine tripartite nonlocality
• Entanglement dynamics in $\kappa$-deformed spacetime
• Information carrying capacity of a cosmological constant
• System-environment dynamics of GHZ-like states in noninertial frames
• Harvesting entanglement from the Lorentz-violating quantum field vacuum in a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate