Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated hydrogen atom coupled with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations

Abstract

We consider a multilevel hydrogen atom in interaction with the quantum electromagnetic field and separately calculate the contributions of the vacuum fluctuation and radiation reaction to the rate of change of the mean atomic energy of the atom for uniform acceleration. It is found that the acceleration disturbs the vacuum fluctuations in such a way that the delicate balance between the contributions of vacuum fluctuation and radiation reaction that exists for inertial atoms is broken, so that the transitions to higher-lying states from ground state are possible even in vacuum. In contrast to the case of an atom interacting with a scalar field, the contributions of both electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the spontaneous emission rate are affected by the acceleration, and furthermore the contribution of the vacuum fluctuations contains a non-thermal acceleration-dependent correction, which is possibly observable.