Boundarylike behaviors of the resonance interatomic energy in a cosmic string spacetime

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the resonance interatomic energy between two atoms is affected by the presence of boundaries and cosmic string spacetime topology, revealing boundary and topological effects on atomic interactions.

Contribution

It generalizes the formalism for resonance interatomic energy to cosmic string spacetime and explores boundary and topological influences on atomic energy exchange.

Findings

Resonance interatomic energy is due to radiation reaction, not field fluctuations.

Boundaries and cosmic strings can enhance, suppress, or nullify the energy.

Cosmic string spacetime properties can be sensed via atomic energy measurements.

Abstract

By generalizing the formalism proposed by Dalibard, Dupont-Roc and Cohen Tannoudji, we study the resonance interatomic energy of two identical atoms coupled to quantum massless scalar fields in a symmetric /antisymmetric entangled state in the Minkowski and cosmic string spacetimes. We find that in both spacetimes, the resonance interatomic energy has nothing to do with the field fluctuations but is attributed to the radiation reaction of the atoms only. We then concretely calculate the resonance interatomic energy of two static atoms near a perfectly reflecting boundary in the Minkowski spacetime and near an infinite and straight cosmic string respectively. We show that the resonance interatomic energy in both cases can be enhanced or suppressed and even nullified as compared with that in an unbounded Minkowski spacetime, because of the presence of the boundary in the Minkowski spacetime or the nontrivial spacetime topological structure of the cosmic string. Besides, we also discover that the resonance interatomic energy in the cosmic string spacetime exhibits some peculiar properties, making it in principle possible to sense different cosmic string spacetimes via the resonance interatomic energy.