Radiative Processes of Two Accelerated Entangled Atoms Near Boundaries

Abstract

By considering the interaction between a two-atom system and the vacuum massless scalar field in the viewpoint of an instantaneously inertial observer, we study the rates of transition of a uniformly accelerated two-atom system in the symmetric/antisymmetric entangled state near a reflecting boundary and in a cavity, respectively. We find that both the downward transition | ψ ± ⟩ → | g A g B ⟩ and the upward transition | ψ ± ⟩ → | e A e B ⟩ occur for the accelerated two-atom system, as in sharp contrast with the case of a static two-atom system, in which the upward transition can never happen. Similar to the rates of transition of atoms immersed in a thermal bath with the FDU temperature, both the downward transition rate and the upward transition rate are characterized by the Plank factor ( e 2 π ω 0 / a − 1 ) − 1 . This character of the transition rates is very different from the other radiative properties of the accelerated two-atom system, such as the resonance interatomic energy, for which the revisions of the effects of uniform acceleration are never characterized by such a factor. We show with analytical and numerical results that both the downward transition and the upward transition processes can be effectively manipulated by the atomic non-inertial motion and by the presence of boundaries. By comparing the upward transition rate with the downward transition rate, we discover that, when ω 0 ≫ a , with ω 0 and a being the energy space and the proper acceleration of the two-atom system, the disentanglement caused by the upward transition is negligible, while, if ω 0 ≪ a , the disentanglement caused by the upward transition becomes as important as that caused by the downward transition.