Violation of equivalence in an accelerating atom-mirror system in the generalized uncertainty principle framework

Abstract

We study the spontaneous excitation of a two-level atom in the presence of a perfectly reflecting mirror, when the atom, or the mirror, is uniformly accelerating in the framework of the generalised uncertainty principle (GUP). The quantized scalar field obeys a modified dispersion relation leading to a GUP deformed Klein-Gordon equation. The solutions of this equation with suitable boundary conditions are obtained to calculate the spontaneous excitation probability of the atom for the two separate cases. We show that in the case when the mirror is accelerating, the GUP modulates the spatial oscillation of the excitation probability of the atom, thus breaking the symmetry between the excitation of an atom accelerating relative to a stationary mirror, and a stationary atom excited by an accelerating mirror. An explicit violation of the equivalence principle seems to be thus manifested. We further obtain an upper bound on the GUP parameter using standard values of the system parameters.