Retarded resonance Casimir-Polder interaction of a uniformly rotating two-atom system

TL;DR

This paper investigates the non-thermal resonance Casimir-Polder interaction of a uniformly rotating two-atom system, revealing retarded responses and entanglement effects influenced by relativistic motion and quantum field interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of RCPI in a rotating system, highlighting non-thermal behavior and retarded responses using quantum master equations for different quantum fields.

Findings

Non-thermal behavior observed in RCPI for rotating atoms.

Retarded response differs from the massless scalar field case.

Entanglement and polarization transfer are affected by relativistic rotation.

Abstract

We consider here, a two-atom system is uniformly moving through a circular ring at an ultra-relativistic speed and weakly interacting with common external fields. The vacuum fluctuations of the quantum fields generate the entanglement between the atoms. Hence an effective energy shift is originated, which depends on the inter-atomic distance. This is commonly known as resonance Casimir-Polder interaction (RCPI). It is well known that, for a linearly accelerated system coupled with a massless scalar field, we get a thermal response when the local inertial approximation is valid. On the contrary, the non-thermality arises in the presence of the centripetal acceleration. We use the quantum master equation formalism to calculate the second-order energy shift of the entangled states in the presence of two kinds of fields. They are the massive free scalar field and the electromagnetic vector field. For both cases, we observe the non-thermal behavior. A unique retarded response is also noticed in comparison to the free massless case, which can be observed via the polarization transfer technique.