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

Abstract

AbstractWe consider a two-atom system uniformly moving through a circular ring at an ultra-relativistic speed and weakly interacting with the common quantum fields. Two kinds of fields are introduced here: a massive free scalar field and electromagnetic (EM) vector fields. The vacuum fluctuations of the quantum fields give rise to the resonance Casimir–Polder interaction (RCPI) in the system. Using the quantum master equation formalism, we calculate the second-order energy shift of the entangled states of the system. We find two major aspects of RCPI in a circular trajectory. The first one is the presence of the centripetal acceleration, which gives rise to non-thermality in the system, and secondly, due to the interaction with the above fields, the energy shift for RCPI is retarded in comparison with the massless scalar field. The retardation effect can die out by decreasing the centripetal acceleration and increasing the Zeeman frequency of the atoms. We also show that this phenomenon can be observed via the polarization transfer technique. The coherence time for the polarization transfer is calculated, which is different for the different fields.