Lamb shift as a witness for quantum noninertial effects

Abstract

The sustained intense experimental activity around atomic spectroscopy and the resulting high-precision measurements of atomic spectral lines attract interest in Lamb shift as a witness for noninertial effects in quantum systems. We investigate the Lamb shift in a two-level system undergoing uniform circular motion and coupled to a quantum electromagnetic field inside a cavity. We show that when the separation between different cavity modes is large compared to the width of each cavity mode, both the inertial and noninertial contributions to the Lamb shift are convergent. In addition, we find that the purely-noninertial Lamb shift maximizes away from the atomic resonance by an amount decided by the angular frequency of the circulating atom, lending itself to efficient enhancement by a suitable tuning of the cavity parameters. We argue that the noninertial contribution becomes detectable at accelerations $\sim 10^{14}m/{\mathrm{s}}^2$.

12 pages, 3 figures. Presentation improved and explanations added

References in corpus (8)

• The Unruh effect and its applications
• Entanglement of Dirac fields in non-inertial frames
• Optimal quantum estimation of the Unruh-Hawking effect
• Continuous variable methods in relativistic quantum information: Characterisation of quantum and classical correlations of scalar field modes in noninertial frames
• Lamb Shift for static atoms outside a Schwarzschild black hole
• Quantum Vacuum Sagnac Effect
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• Can spacetime curvature induced corrections to Lamb shift be observable?

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• Spontaneous excitation of a centripetally accelerated atom coupled to electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations near a reflecting boundary
• Extensive manipulation of transition rates and substantial population inversion of rotating atoms inside a cavity
• Local Short-Time Acceleration induced Spectral Line Broadening and Possible Implications in Cosmology
• Finite-time Unruh effect: Waiting for the transient effects to fade off