arXiv subjects

Shijing Cheng

Publications and source records attributed to Shijing Cheng.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Gravitational Casimir-Polder interaction in a thermal bath

We have investigated, by separating the contributions from thermal fluctuations (tf) and the radiation reaction (rr), the gravitational Casimir-Polder interaction between a gravitationally polarizable two-level object and an infinite gravitational Dirichlet boundary in a thermal bath at a temperature $T$. The results indicate that the rr-contribution to the interaction potential is independent of the temperature, whereas the tf-contribution is generally governed by a nontrivial interplay between the thermal corrections and the polarization effect. Here, the object-to-boundary distance, the characteristic transition wavelength of the object and the thermal wavelength of gravitons are denoted by $L$, $\lambda$ and $\beta$, respectively. In contrast to the vacuum case, where the interaction potential scales as $L^{-5}$ for $L\ll\lambda$ and $L^{-6}$ for $L\gg\lambda$, corresponding to an always repulsive force, qualitatively new behaviors emerge at high temperatures. Particularly, when $\sqrt[4]{\beta\lambda^3}\ll L\ll\lambda$ and the object is polarizable within the plane perpendicular to the boundary, a novel scaling of $TL^{-1}$ arises; when $\sqrt{\beta\lambda}\ll L\ll\lambda$ and the object is polarizable along the vertical-to-boundary axis, the interaction force becomes surprisingly attractive. At extremely high temperatures and large distances, i.e. when $\beta\ll \lambda\ll L$, the potential oscillates with the distance $L$ and thus an attractive or repulsive and even vanishing force can be resulted, depending on the exact values of $L$. Our work demonstrates that thermal gravitons can act as an active control mechanism for quantum gravitational interactions, and temperature, polarization configuration, and object-to-boundary distance jointly determine the magnitude, scaling law, and even the attractive or repulsive nature of the interaction force.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Effects of acceleration on interatomic interactions

The Unruh effect establishes a fundamental equivalence between acceleration and thermality by demonstrating that a uniformly accelerated ground-state detector undergoes excitation as if immersed in a thermal bath. In this paper, we investigate how acceleration influences the interaction between two ground-state atoms that are synchronously and uniformly accelerated in vacuum with proper acceleration $a$ and coupled to a fluctuating electromagnetic field. We find that the resulting interaction potential comprises both diagonal components $(\delta E)^{jk}$ with $j=k$, which are present in both inertial and acceleration cases, and off-diagonal components $(\delta E)^{jk}$ with $j\neq k$, which arise exclusively due to acceleration and vanish in the inertial case. The dependence of each component on acceleration and interatomic separation $L$ generally differs. For small accelerations, the leading-order diagonal components of the van der Waals (vdW) and Casimir-Polder (CP) interaction potentials remain unchanged from their inertial counterparts, exhibiting the standard scaling behaviors $\sim L^{-6}$ and $\sim L^{-7}$, respectively. In contrast, the off-diagonal components scale as $\sim a^2L^{-4}$ in the vdW subregions and $\sim a^2L^{-5}$ in the CP subregion. However, when the acceleration becomes sufficiently large, both diagonal and off-diagonal components of the vdW and CP interaction potentials are significantly modified, giving rise to entirely new interaction behaviors that deviate from those observed in the inertial case, whether in vacuum or thermal environments, indicating a breakdown of the acceleration-thermality equivalence established by the Unruh effect for single detectors.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2024

Interaction between Unruh-Dewitt detectors exclusively due to acceleration: A Parallel to the FDU Effect

We have discovered an interaction between two detectors in a vacuum that emerges exclusively due to acceleration, akin to the spontaneous excitation of a single detector as predicted by the Fulling-Davies-Unruh (FDU) effect. However, this interaction contrasts sharply with the FDU effect, which suggests that a uniformly accelerated detector behaves as if it were in a thermal bath, as the discovered interaction does not manifest in a thermal environment. The novel interaction displays unique dependencies on the separation between detectors: it can be either attractive or repulsive, with the potential to transition between these behaviors as the inter-detector separation changes. More intriguingly, it exhibits a surprising large-small duality in its dependence on acceleration, suggesting the existence of an optimal acceleration at which the interaction is strongest, in contrast to the monotonic acceleration-dependence of the FDU effect.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2022

Understanding thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime via inter-detector interaction

The seminar discovery by Gibbons and Hawking that a freely falling detector observes an isotropic background of thermal radiation reveals that de Sitter space is equivalent to a thermal bath at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature in Minkowski space, as far as the response rate of the detector is concerned. Meanwhile, for a static detector which is endowed with a proper acceleration with respect to the local freely-falling detectors, the temperature becomes the square root of the sum of the squared Gibbons-Hawking temperature and the squared Unruh temperature associated with the proper acceleration of the detector. Here, we demonstrate, by examining the interaction of two static detectors in the de Sitter invariant vacuum, that de Sitter space in regard to its thermal nature is unique on its own right in the sense that it is even neither equivalent to the thermal bath in Minkowski space when the static detectors become freely-falling nor to the Unruh thermal bath at the cosmological horizon where the Unruh effect dominates, insofar as the behavior of the inter-detector interaction in de Sitter space dramatically differs both from that in the Minkowski thermal bath and the Unruh thermal bath.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2022

Probing long-range properties of vacuum altered by uniformly accelerating two spatially separated Unruh-DeWitt detectors

In a quantum sense, vacuum is not an empty void but full of virtual particles (fields). It may have long-range properties, be altered, and even undergo phase transitions. It is suggested that long-range properties of a quantum vacuum may be probed by distributing matter over a large spatial volume. Here, we study a simplest example of such, i.e., two uniformly accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detectors which are spatially separated, and examine the inter-detector interaction energy arising from the coupling between the detectors and fluctuating fields to see if novel phenomena related to the long-range properties emerge of a vacuum altered by uniformly accelerating two spatially separated detectors through it. Our results show that when the inter-detector separation is much larger than the thermal wavelength of the Unruh thermal bath, the inter-detector interaction displays a completely new behavior, which, as compared with that of the inertial detectors, is surprisingly exclusively acceleration-dependent, signaling a new phase of the vacuum in which its imprint as seen by two inertial observers seems to be completely wiped out. Moreover, we demonstrate that the inter-detector interaction in the near region can be significantly enhanced by the accelerated motion in certain circumstances, and with two Rydberg atoms as the detectors, the acceleration required for an experimentally detectable enhancement of the interaction energy can be $10^5$ times smaller than that required for the detection of the Unruh effect.

hep-th↗

arXiv2022

Quantum thermal field fluctuation induced corrections to the interaction between two ground-state atoms

We generalize the formalism proposed by Dalibard, Dupont-Roc, and Cohen-Tannoudji [the DDC formalism] in the fourth order for two atoms in interaction with scalar fields in vacuum to a thermal bath at finite temperature $T$, and then calculate the interatomic interaction energy of two ground-state atoms separately in terms of the contributions of thermal fluctuations and the radiation reaction of the atoms and analyze in detail the thermal corrections to the van der Waals and Casimir-Polder interactions. We discover a particular region, i.e., $\sqrt[4]{\lambda^3\beta}\ll L\ll \lambda$ with $L$, $\beta$ and $\lambda$ denoting the interatomic separation, the wavelength of thermal photons and the transition wavelength of the atoms respectively, where the thermal corrections remarkably render the van der Waals force, which is usually attractive, repulsive, leading to an interesting crossover phenomenon of the interatomic interaction from attractive to repulsive as the temperature increases. We also find that the thermal corrections cause significant changes to the Casimir-Polder force when the temperature is sufficiently high, resulting in an attractive force proportional to $TL^{-3}$ in the $\lambda\ll\beta\ll L$ region, and a force which can be either attractive or repulsive and even vanishing in the $ \beta\ll\lambda\ll L$ region depending on the interatomic separation.

hep-th↗

arXiv2020

Interatomic interaction of two ground-state atoms in vacuum: contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction

We generalize the formalism proposed by Dalibard, Dupont-Roc and Cohen-Tannoudji [the DDC formalism] to the fourth order of the coupling constant, which can be used to study the interatomic interaction of two ground-state atoms coupled with the vacuum scalar fields. We show that the interatomic potential can be attributed to the joint effect of both vacuum fluctuations and the radiation reaction of atoms. Remarkably, the formulae we derived for the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and the radiation reaction to the interatomic potential upon which future research on fourth-order effects in particular circumstances can be based differ from those in the existing literature [Phys. Rev. D 95, 085014 (2017)].

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Spontaneous excitation of an accelerated atom coupled with quantum fluctuations of spacetime

A direct consequence of quantization of gravity would be quantum gravitational vacuum fluctuations which induce quadrupole moments in gravitationally polarizable atoms. In this paper, we study the spontaneous excitation of a gravitationally polarizable atom with a uniform acceleration $a$ in interaction with a bath of fluctuating quantum gravitational fields in vacuum, and compare the result with that of a static one in a thermal bath of gravitons at the Unruh temperature. We find that, under the fluctuations of spacetime itself, transitions to higher-lying excited states from the ground state are possible for both the uniformly accelerated atom in vacuum and the static one in a thermal bath. The appearance of terms in the transition rates proportional to $a^4$ and $a^2$ indicates that the equivalence between uniform acceleration and thermal field is lost.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2018

Quantum fluctuations of spacetime generate quantum entanglement between gravitationally polarizable subsystems

There should be quantum vacuum fluctuations of spacetime itself, if we accept that the basic quantum principles we are already familiar with apply as well to a quantum theory of gravity. In this paper, we study, in linearized quantum gravity, the quantum entanglement generation at the neighborhood of the initial time between two independent gravitationally polarizable two-level subsystems caused by fluctuating quantum vacuum gravitational fields in the framework of open quantum systems. A bath of fluctuating quantum vacuum gravitational fields serves as an environment that provides indirect interactions between the two gravitationally polarizable subsystems, which may lead to entanglement generation. We find that the entanglement generation is crucially dependent on the polarizations, i.e, they cannot get entangled in certain circumstances when the polarizations of the subsystems are different while they always can when the polarizations are the same. We also show that the presence of a boundary may render parallel aligned subsystems entangled which are otherwise unentangled in a free space. However, the presence of the boundary does not help in terms of entanglement generation if the two subsystems are vertically aligned.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2018

Entanglement dynamics for uniformly accelerated two-level atoms in the presence of a reflecting boundary

We study the entanglement dynamics for two uniformly accelerated two-level atoms in interaction with a bath of fluctuating electromagnetic fields in vacuum in the presence of a reflecting boundary. We consider two different alignments of atoms, i.e. parallel and vertical alignments with respect to the boundary. In particular, we focus on the effects of the boundary, and acceleration on the entanglement dynamics, which are closely related to the orientations of polarization. For the parallel case, the initial entanglement of two transversely polarizable atoms very close to the boundary can be preserved as if it were a closed system, while for two vertically polarizable atoms, the concurrence evolves two times as fast as that in the free space. In the presence of a boundary, entanglement revival is possible for two atoms initially in the symmetric state depending on the orientations of the atomic polarizations, which is in sharp contrast to the fact that the concurrence always decays monotonically in the free space. Interestingly, two initially separable atoms, for which entanglement generation can never happen in the free space with any given acceleration and separation, can get entangled in the presence of a boundary if they are aligned parallel to the boundary. The birth time of entanglement can be noticeably advanced or postponed for the parallel two-atom system placed close to the boundary, while the maximal concurrence during evolution can be significantly enhanced when the atoms are vertically aligned. Moreover, two inertial atoms with different polarizations remain separable all the time, while as the acceleration increases, the delayed birth of entanglement happens, and the nonzero concurrence can be enhanced.

quant-ph↗