The Lamb shift in the BTZ spacetime

Abstract

We study the Lamb shift of a two-level atom arising from its coupling to the conformal massless scalar field, which satisfies the Dirichlet boundary condition, in the Hartle-Hawking vacuum in the BTZ spacetime, and find that the Lamb shift in the BTZ spacetime is structurally similar to that of a uniformly accelerated atom near a perfectly reflecting boundary in (2+1)-dimensional flat spacetime. Our results show that the Lamb shift is suppressed in the BTZ spacetime as compared to that in the flat spacetime as long as the transition wavelength of the atom is much larger than AdS radius of the BTZ spacetime while it can be either suppressed or enhanced if the transition wavelength of the atom is much less than AdS radius, depending on the location of the atom. In contrast, the Lamb shift is always suppressed very close to the horizon of the BTZ spacetime and remarkably it reduces to that in the flat spacetime as the horizon is approached although the local temperature blows up there.