Lamb shift as a witness for quantum noninertial effects

Published 30 May 2023 in quant-ph and gr-qc | (2305.19172v3)

Abstract: The sustained intense experimental activity around atomic spectroscopy and the resulting high-precision measurements of atomic spectral lines attract interest in Lamb shift as a witness for noninertial effects in quantum systems. We investigate the Lamb shift in a two-level system undergoing uniform circular motion and coupled to a quantum electromagnetic field inside a cavity. We show that when the separation between different cavity modes is large compared to the width of each cavity mode, both the inertial and noninertial contributions to the Lamb shift are convergent. In addition, we find that the purely-noninertial Lamb shift maximizes away from the atomic resonance by an amount decided by the angular frequency of the circulating atom, lending itself to efficient enhancement by a suitable tuning of the cavity parameters. We argue that the noninertial contribution becomes detectable at accelerations $\sim 10^{{14}~\mathrm{m/s^2}$.}