Motion-Induced Radiation Due to an Atom in the Presence of a Graphene Plane

Abstract

We study the motion-induced radiation due to the non-relativistic motion of an atom, coupled to the vacuum electromagnetic field by an electric dipole term, in the presence of a static graphene plate. After computing the probability of emission for an accelerated atom in empty space, we evaluate the corrections due to the presence of the plate. We show that the effect of the plate is to increase the probability of emission when the atom is near the plate and oscillates along a direction perpendicular to it. On the contrary, for parallel oscillations, there is a suppression. We also evaluate the quantum friction on an atom moving at constant velocity parallel to the plate. We show that there is a threshold for quantum friction: friction occurs only when the velocity of the atom is larger than the Fermi velocity of the electrons in graphene.

Dynamical Casimir effects with atoms: From the emission of photon pairs to geometric phases

“…DCE is usually considered within a macroscopic approach based on boundary conditions [5,6] or scattering matrices [7,8] for the quantum field. On a more fundamental microscopic level, DCE can be described at the atomic scale [9][10][11][12][13] with the help of quantum optical Hamiltonian models for the atom-field coupling.…”

Time-Dependent Effective Hamiltonians for Light–Matter Interactions

“…which involves only the molecular degrees of freedom and quantifies the linear response of the molecule to an applied field connecting internal states |e⟩ and |g⟩. Note that, when taking |e⟩ = |g⟩ in Equation ( 20), the tensor ← → D yields as a particular case the polarizability of the molecule, which is given by Equation (13). The TPSE rate is immediately obtained in the long-time limit by substituting Equation ( 19) into Fermi's golden rule.…”

“…With the DP Hamiltonian, intermolecular interactions are determined by means of a second-order calculation. Effective Hamiltonians and actions are also useful in describing non-stationary systems and have been employed to develop a multipolar approach to the dynamical Casimir effect [ 9 ] and to understand its microscopic origin [ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ].…”

Multipole Approach to the Dynamical Casimir Effect with Finite-Size Scatterers

“…In this situation, the most convenient way to address the photon production is not by imposing boundary conditions on the moving plate [ 14 ] and deriving a relation between output and input fields [ 15 , 16 , 17 ] (for instance in terms of a Bogoliubov transformation [ 18 ]), but rather to employ directly a Hamiltonian approach [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Within the dipolar approximation, this strategy was successfully applied to evaluate the generation of photon pairs by an oscillating atom [ 23 ] in the microscopic dynamical Casimir effect (MDCE) [ 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. In the present paper, we first revisit the MDCE effect by providing an alternative derivation of the associated Hamiltonian where the dipole motion gives rise to time-dependent higher-order multipole moments ( Section 2 ).…”