Thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime and spontaneous excitation of atoms

2008/02/12 by Zhiying Zhu, Hongwei Yu
Physics and Astronomy · #Atom (system on chip) #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #De Sitter space #De Sitter universe #Massless particle #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum field theory in curved spacetime #Scalar (mathematics) #Scalar field #Spacetime #Thermal #Unruh effect #gr-qc #hep-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2008/02/033

published as JHEP0802:033,2008 · 11 pages

openalex publication_date 2008/02/12 · arxiv created 2008/02/14 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We consider, in de Sitter spacetime, both freely falling and static two-level atoms in interaction with a conformally coupled massless scalar field in the de Sitter-invariant vacuum, and separately calculate the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the atom's spontaneous excitation rate. We find that spontaneous excitations occur even for the freely falling atom as if there is a thermal bath of radiation at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature and we thus recover, in a different physical context, the results of Gibbons and Hawking that reveals the thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime. Similarly, for the case of the static atom, our results show that the atom also perceives a thermal bath which now arises as a result of the intrinsic thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime and the Unruh effect associated with the inherent acceleration of the atom.

Citations

• Fulling–Davies–Unruh effect and spontaneous excitation of an accelerated atom interacting with a quantum scalar field
• Relationship between Hawking radiation from black holes and spontaneous excitation of atoms
• Some Observable Effects of the Quantum-Mechanical Fluctuations of the Electromagnetic Field
• The dS/CFT correspondence
• Quantum field theory in de Sitter space: renormalization by point-splitting