Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect and spontaneous excitation of an accelerated atom interacting with a quantum scalar field

Abstract

We investigate, from the point of view of a coaccelerated frame, the spontaneous excitation of a uniformly accelerated two-level atom interacting with a scalar field in a thermal state at a finite temperature $T$ and show that the same spontaneous excitation rate for the uniformly accelerated atom in the Minkowski vacuum obtained in the inertial frame can only be recovered in the coaccelerated frame assuming a thermal bath at the Fulling-Davies-Unruh temperature $T_{FDU}=a/2\pi$ for what appears to be the Minkowski vacuum to the inertial observer. Our discussion provides another example of a physical process different from those examined before in the literature to better understand the Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect.

12 pages, no figures, accepted for publication in PLB

References in corpus (3)

• Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated hydrogen atom coupled with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations
• Vacuum fluctuations and Brownian motion of a charged test particle near a reflecting boundary
• Brownian motion of a charged test particle near a reflecting boundary at finite temperature

Cited by in corpus (16)

• The Unruh effect and its applications
• Position dependent energy level shifts of an accelerated atom in the presence of a boundary
• Geometric phase for an accelerated two-level atom and the Unruh effect
• Do static atoms outside a Schwarzschild black hole spontaneously excite?
• Resonance interaction energy between two accelerated identical atoms in a coaccelerated frame and the Unruh effect
• Spontaneous excitation of a uniformly accelerated atom coupled with vacuum Dirac field fluctuations
• Dispersion Interactions between Neutral Atoms and the Quantum Electrodynamical Vacuum
• Thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime and spontaneous excitation of atoms
• Dissipation suppression for an Unruh-DeWitt battery with a reflecting boundary
• Interatomic interaction of two ground-state atoms in vacuum: contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction
• Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect for accelerated two-level single and entangled atomic systems
• Probing long-range properties of vacuum altered by uniformly accelerating two spatially separated Unruh-DeWitt detectors
• Uniformly accelerated quantum counting detector in Minkowski and Fulling vacuum states
• Quantum thermal field fluctuation induced corrections to the interaction between two ground-state atoms
• Spontaneous excitation of a centripetally accelerated atom coupled to electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations near a reflecting boundary
• Single and entangled atomic systems in thermal bath and the Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect