Response of a uniformly accelerated detector to massless Rarita-Schwinger fields in vacuum

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a uniformly accelerated two-level atom interacts with vacuum massless Rarita-Schwinger fields, revealing unique acceleration-dependent excitation rates involving high powers of acceleration.

Contribution

It generalizes the formalism for nonlinear coupling of accelerated detectors to Rarita-Schwinger fields and calculates the atomic energy change rate, highlighting novel acceleration effects.

Findings

Atom spontaneously excites due to vacuum Rarita-Schwinger fluctuations.

Excitation rate includes terms proportional to acceleration to the sixth and eighth powers.

Distinct behavior compared to scalar, electromagnetic, and Dirac fields.

Abstract

We study the response of a uniformly accelerated detector modeled by a two-level atom nonlinearly coupled to vacuum massless Rarita-Schwinger fields. We first generalize the formalism developed by Dalibard, Dupont-Roc, and Cohen-Tannoudji in the linear coupling case, and we then calculate the mean rate of change of the atomic energy of the accelerated atom. Our result shows that a uniformly accelerated atom in its ground state interacting with vacuum Rarita-Schwinger field fluctuations would spontaneously transition to an excited state and the unique feature in contrast to the case of the atom coupled to the scalar, electromagnetic and Dirac fields is the appearance of terms in the excitation rate which are proportional to the sixth and eighth powers of acceleration.