Atomic stability and the quantum mass equivalence

Abstract

We consider an unexplored aspect of the mass equivalence principle in the quantum realm, its connection with atomic stability. We show that if the gravitational mass were different from the inertial one, a Hydrogen atom placed in a constant gravitational field would become unstable in the long term. In contrast, independently of the relation between the two masses, the atom does not become ionized in an uniformly accelerated frame. This work, in the line of previous analyses studying the properties of quantum systems in gravitational fields, contributes to the extension of that programme to internal variables.

Accepted in MPLA

References in corpus (3)

• The Energy-Level Shifts of a Stationary Hydrogen Atom in Static External Gravitational Field with Schwarzschild Geometry
• Hydrogen atom wave function and eigen energy in the Rindler space
• Inequivalence between gravitational mass and energy due to quantum effects at microscopic and macroscopic levels