Acceleration radiation from vibrating atoms in Schwarzschild spacetime
Abstract
Motivated by the work of Scully \textit{et al.} [ \textcolor{blue}{Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 115, 8131 (2018)}] and Dolan \textit{et al.}[ \textcolor{blue}{New J. Phys. 22, 033026 (2020)}], we study the acceleration radiation from a two-level Unruh-DeWitt detector that undergoes small-amplitude radial oscillations at fixed mean radius outside a Schwarzschild black hole. The massless scalar field is quantized in the Boulware vacuum to isolate curvature-modulated acceleration effects without a thermal Hawking background. Working in a (1+1) radial reduction and using first-order time-dependent perturbation, we evaluate the period-averaged transition rate (or the Floquet transition rate). The resulting particle emission spectrum exhibits a thermal Bose-Einstein-type profile with periodic trajectory yielding a Floquet resonance condition and a closed-form expression for the Floquet transition rate , which reduces to the flat Minkowski spacetime result as , in agreement with Near the horizon, enhances the effective Bessel argument by , providing a simple analytic demonstration of curvature/redshift amplification of acceleration radiation. In particular, the spectrum weighted by the Bessel function becomes ill-defined near the black hole horizon as , possibly manifesting the well-known pathological behavior of the Boulware vacuum state. We discuss the regime of validity (small amplitude, away from the horizon) and outline the extensions to (3+1) dimensions, including density-of-states and greybody factors, and to alternative vacuum choices. Our results offer an analytically tractable link between flat-space vibrating atom proposals and black-hole spacetimes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.11761,
title = {Acceleration radiation from vibrating atoms in Schwarzschild spacetime},
author = {Reggie C. Pantig and Ali Övgün and Syed Masood and Li-Gang Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.11761},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
20 pages, 3 figures. Changed the title and improved the Abstracts. Added some minor clarifications in the main text. Comments are welcome