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

Abstract

A direct consequence of quantization of gravity would be quantum gravitational vacuum fluctuations which induce quadrupole moments in gravitationally polarizable atoms. In this paper, we study the spontaneous excitation of a gravitationally polarizable atom with a uniform acceleration $a$ in interaction with a bath of fluctuating quantum gravitational fields in vacuum, and compare the result with that of a static one in a thermal bath of gravitons at the Unruh temperature. We find that, under the fluctuations of spacetime itself, transitions to higher-lying excited states from the ground state are possible for both the uniformly accelerated atom in vacuum and the static one in a thermal bath. The appearance of terms in the transition rates proportional to $a^4$ and $a^2$ indicates that the equivalence between uniform acceleration and thermal field is lost.

15 pages, 1 figure, published version

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• High frequency background gravitational waves from spontaneous emission of gravitons by hydrogen and helium
• Atom-field dynamics in curved spacetime
• Spontaneous excitation of a centripetally accelerated atom coupled to electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations near a reflecting boundary
• Trajectory of a massive localised wave function in a curved spacetime geometry