Interaction between two gravitationally polarizable objects induced by thermal bath of gravitons

Abstract

The quadrupole-quadrupole interaction between a pair of gravitationally polarizable objects induced by vacuum fluctuations of the quantum linearized gravitational field is first obtained with a relatively simple method, which is then used to investigate the contribution of thermal fluctuations of a bath of gravitons to the interaction at temperature $T$. Our result shows that, in the high temperature limit, the contribution of thermal fluctuations dominates over that of vacuum fluctuations and the interaction potential behaves like $T/r^{10}$, where $r$ is the separation between the objects, and in the low temperature limit, the contribution of thermal fluctuations is proportional to $T^{10}/r$, which only provides a small correction to the interaction induced by zero-point fluctuations.

11 pages. Accepted by PRD

References in corpus (4)

• Recent Developments in the Casimir Effect
• Casimir-Polder interatomic potential between two atoms at finite temperature and in the presence of boundary conditions
• Analytical On-shell Calculation of Low Energy Higher Order Scattering
• Quantum correction to classical gravitational interaction between two polarizable objects

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated atom coupled with quantum fluctuations of spacetime