We study the resonance interaction between two uniformly accelerated identical atoms, one excited and the other in the ground state, prepared in a correlated (symmetric or antisymmetric) state and interacting with the scalar field or the electromagnetic field in the vacuum state. In this case (resonance interaction), the interatomic interaction is a second-order effect in the atom-field coupling. We separate the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the resonance energy shift of the system, and show that only radiation reaction contributes, while Unruh thermal fluctuations do not affect the resonance interaction. We also find that beyond a characteristic length scale related to the atomic acceleration, non-thermal-like effects in the radiation reaction contribution change the distance-dependence of the resonance interaction. Finally, we find that previously unidentified features appear, compared with the scalar field case, when the interaction with the electromagnetic field is considered, as a consequence of the peculiar nature of the vacuum quantum noise of the electromagnetic field in a relativistically accelerated background.

We consider a generalization of the non-Hermitian PT symmetric Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian, recently introduced for studying optical phenomena with time-dependent physical parameters, that includes environment-induced decay. In particular, we investigate the interaction of a two-level fermionic system (such as a two-level atom) with a single bosonic field mode in a cavity. The states of the two-level system are allowed to decay because of the interaction with the environment, and this is included phenomenologically in our non-Hermitian Hamiltonian by introducing complex energies for the fermion system. We focus our attention on the occurrence of exceptional points in the spectrum of the Hamiltonian, clarifying its mathematical and physical meaning.

We consider a two-level system such as a two-level atom, interacting with a cavity field mode in the rotating wave approximation, when the atomic transition frequency or the field mode frequency is periodically driven in time. We show that in both cases, for an appropriate choice of the modulation parameters, the state amplitudes in a generic rc-excitation subspace obey the same equations of motion that can be obtained from a static non-Hermitian Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian with V T symmetry, that is with an imaginary coupling constant. This gives further support to recent results showing the possible physical interest of V T symmetric non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. We also generalize the well-known diagonalization of the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian to the non-Hermitian case in terms of pseudobosons and pseudofermions, and discuss relevant mathematical and physical aspects.