English

Acceleration radiation from vibrating atoms in Schwarzschild spacetime

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2025-11-19 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

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 R0R_0 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 nΩ>ω0n\Omega > \omega_0 and a closed-form expression for the Floquet transition rate Pn\overline{P}_n, which reduces to the flat Minkowski spacetime result as R0R_0\to\infty, in agreement with Near the horizon, f(R0)<1f(R_0)<1 enhances the effective Bessel argument by 1/f(R0)1/\sqrt{f(R_0)}, 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 R02MR_{0}\rightarrow 2M, possibly manifesting the well-known pathological behavior of the Boulware vacuum state. We discuss the regime of validity (small amplitude, R0R_0 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