Motivated by the success of the recently proposed method of anomaly cancellation to derive Hawking fluxes from black hole horizons of spacetimes in various dimensions, we have further extended the covariant anomaly cancellation method shortly simplified by Banerjee and Kulkarni to explore the Hawking radiation of the (3+1)-dimensional charged rotating black strings and their higher dimensional extensions in anti-de Sitter spacetimes, whose horizons are not spherical but can be toroidal, cylindrical or planar, according to their global identifications. It should be emphasized that our analysis presented here is very general in the sense that the determinant of the reduced (1+1)-dimensional effective metric from these black strings need not be equal to one $(\sqrt{-g} \neq 1)$. Our results indicate that the gauge and energy momentum fluxes needed to cancel the (1+1)-dimensional covariant gauge and gravitational anomalies are compatible with the Hawking fluxes. Besides, thermodynamics of these black strings are studied in the case of a variable cosmological constant.
Generalising the method of Wilczek and collaborators we provide a derivation of Hawking radiation from charged black holes using only covariant gauge and gravitational anomalies. The reliability and universality of the anomaly cancellation approach to Hawking radiation is also discussed.
From appropriate expressions for effective actions, the Hawking radiation from charged black holes is derived, using only covariant boundary conditions at the event horizon. The connection of our approach with the Unruh vacuum and the recent analysis \cite{Robwilczek,Isowilczek,shailesh} of Hawking radiation using anomalies is established.
The basic characteristics of the covariant chiral current $<J_μ>$ and the covariant chiral energy-momentum tensor $<T_{μν}>$ are obtained from a chiral effective action. These results are used to justify the covariant boundary condition used in recent approaches \cite{Isowilczek,Isoumtwilczek,shailesh,shailesh2,Banerjee} of computing the Hawking flux from chiral gauge and gravitational anomalies. We also discuss a connection of our results with the conventional calculation of nonchiral currents and stress tensors in different (Unruh, Hartle-Hawking and Boulware) states.
In the context of black hole chemistry, we study the thermodynamics of asymptotically de Sitter black holes with conformal scalar hair in Einstein gravity. The hair parameter allows us to attain thermodynamic equilibrium between the event horizon and the cosmological horizon. We find that the system of the black hole and the de Sitter space surrounding it undergo a Reverse Hawking-Page phase transition provided we consider the grand-canonical ensemble.
Recently, Banerjee and Kulkarni (R. Banerjee, S. Kulkarni, arXiv:0707.2449 [hep-th]) suggested that it is conceptually clean and economical to use only the covariant anomaly to derive Hawking radiation from a black hole. Based upon this simplified formalism, we apply the covariant anomaly cancellation method to investigate Hawking radiation from a modified Schwarzschild black hole in the theory of rainbow gravity. Hawking temperature of the gravity's rainbow black hole is derived from the energy-momentum flux by requiring it to cancel the covariant gravitational anomaly at the horizon. We stre…
Applying Parikh's semi-classical tunneling method, we consider Hawking radiation of the charged massive particles as a tunneling process from the Reissner-Nordstrom-de Sitter black hole with a global monopole. The result shows that the tunneling rate is related to the change of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy and the radiant spectrum is not a pure thermal one, but is consistent with an underlying unitary theory.
Hawking radiation is obtained from anomalies resulting from a breaking of diffeomorphism symmetry near the event horizon of a black hole. Such anomalies, manifested as a nonconservation of the energy momentum tensor, occur in two different forms -- covariant and consistent. The crucial role of covariant anomalies near the horizon is revealed since this is the {\it only} input required to obtain the Hawking flux, thereby highlighting the universality of this effect. A brief description to apply this method to obtain thermodynamic entities like entropy or temperature is provided.
We calculate the total flux of Hawking radiation from Kerr-(anti)de Sitter black holes by using gravitational anomaly method developed in gr-qc/0502074. We consider the general Kerr-(anti)de Sitter black holes in arbitrary $D$ dimensions with the maximal number [D/2] of independent rotating parameters. We find that the physics near the horizon can be described by an infinite collection of $(1+1)$-dimensional quantum fields coupled to a set of gauge fields with charges proportional to the azimuthal angular momentums $m_i$. With the requirement of anomaly cancellation and regularity at the horiz…
Incorporating Parikh and Wilczek's opinion to the Kerr de-Sitter (KdS) black hole Hawking non-thermal and purely thermal radiations have been investigated using Hamilton-Jacobi method. We have taken the background spacetime of KdS black hole as dynamical, involving the self-gravitation effect of the emitted particles, energy and angular momentum has been taken as conserved and show that the tunneling rate is related to the change of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy and the derived emission spectrum deviates from the pure thermal spectrum. The explored results gives a correction to the Hawking radiat…
Recent work that treats the Hawking radiation as a semi-classical tunnelling process from the four-dimensional Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstrom black holes is extended to the case of higher dimensional Reissner-Nordstrom-de Sitter black holes. The result shows that the tunnelling rate is related to the change of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy and the exact radiant spectrum is no longer precisely thermal after considering the black hole background as dynamical and incorporating the self-gravitation effect of the emitted particles when the energy conservation and electric charge conservation are…
We study the greybody factor and power spectra of Hawking radiation for the minimally or nonminimally coupled scalar field with exact numerical method in spherically symmetric Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet-de Sitter black hole spacetime. The effects of scalar coupling constant, angular momentum number of scalar, spacetime dimension, cosmological constant and Gauss-Bonnet coupling constant on the Hawking radiation are studied in detail. Specifically, the Gauss-Bonnet coupling constant always increases the greybody factor in the entire energy regime. Different from the case of Schwarzschild-de Sitter bl…
The constant curvature (CC) black holes are higher dimensional generalizations of BTZ black holes. It is known that these black holes have the unusual topology of ${\cal M}_{D-1}\times S^1$, where $D$ is the spacetime dimension and ${\cal M}_{D-1}$ stands for a conformal Minkowski spacetime in $D-1$ dimensions. The unusual topology and time-dependence for the exterior of these black holes cause some difficulties to derive their thermodynamic quantities. In this work, by using globally embedding approach, we obtain the Hawking temperature of the CC black holes. We find that the Hawking temperat…
We construct a de Sitter invariant photon propagator in general covariant gauges. Our result is a natural generalization of the Allen-Jacobson photon propagator in Feynman gauge. Our propagator reproduces the correct response to a point static charge and the one-loop electromagnetic stress-energy tensor, strongly suggesting that it is suitable for perturbative calculations on de Sitter.
Considering generalised action for dilaton coupled Maxwell-Einstein theory in four dimensions, Gao and Zhang obtained black holes solutions for asymptotically anti de Sitter (Ads) and de Sitter (ds) spacetimes. We study the Hawking radiation in Parikh-Wilczek's tunneling formalism as well as using Bogoliubov transformations. We compare the expression of the Hawking temperature obtained from these two different approaches. Stability and the extremality conditions for such black holes are discussed. The exact dependences of the Hawking temperature and flux on the dilaton coupling parameter are d…
The massive particles tunneling method has been used to investigate the Hawking non-thermal and purely thermal radiations of Schwarzschild Anti-de Sitter (SAdS) black hole. Considering the spacetime background to be dynamical, incorporate the self-gravitation effect of the emitted particles the imaginary part of the action has been derived from Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Using the conservation laws of energy and angular momentum we have showed that the non-thermal and purely thermal tunneling rates are related to the change of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy and the derived emission spectrum deviate…
We discuss the quantization of linearized gravity in the background de Sitter spacetime using a gauge-invariant formalism to write the perturbed gravitational field in the static patch. This field is quantized after fixing the gauge completely. The response rate of this field to monochromatic multipole sources is then computed in the thermal equilibrium state with the well known Gibbons-Hawking temperature. We compare this response rate with the one obtained in the Bunch-Davies-like vacuum state defined in the Poincaré patch. These response rates are found to be the same as expected. This agre…
The covariant free fields of any spin on anti-de Sitter spacetimes are studied, pointing out that these transform under isometries according to covariant representations of the anti-de Sitter isometry group, induced by those of the Lorentz group. Applying the method of ladder operators it is shown that the covariant representations with unique spin are equivalent with discrete unitary irreducible representations of positive energy of the universal covering group of the isometry one. The action of the Casimir operators is studied finding how the weights of these representations may depend on th…
We derive covariant expressions for the one loop vacuum polarization induced by a charged scalar on de Sitter background. Two forms are employed: one in which two covariant derivatives act on de Sitter invariant basis tensors multiplied by scalar structure functions, and the other in which four covariant derivatives act on a single basis tensor times a structure function. The second representation permits the correction to dynamical photons to be expressed as a surface integral, which raises the important question of what sorts of effects can be absorbed into corrections of the initial state. …
We comment on the consistence of the epsilon anti-symmetric tensor adopted in [R. Banerjee and S. Kulkarni, arXiv:0707.2449] when it is generalized in the general case where $\sqrt{-g} \neq 1$. It is pointed out that the correct non-minimal consistent gauge and gravitational anomalies should by multiplied a factor $\sqrt{-g} \neq 1$. We also sketch the generalization of their work to the $\sqrt{-g} \neq 1$ case.
We analyze, in the paradigm of open quantum systems, the reduced dynamics of a freely-falling two-level detector in de Sitter space-time in weak interaction with a reservoir of fluctuating quantized conformal scalar fields in the de Sitter invariant vacuum. We find that the detector is asymptotically driven to a thermal state at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature, regardless of its initial state. Our discussion therefore shows that the Gibbons-Hawking effect of de Sitter space-time can be understood as a manifestation of thermalization phenomena that involves decoherence and dissipation in open q…
We propose an experimental scheme to observe the Gibbons-Hawking effect in the acoustic analog of a 1+1-dimensional de Sitter universe, produced in an expanding, cigar-shaped Bose-Einstein condensate. It is shown that a two-level system created at the center of the trap, an atomic quantum dot interacting with phonons, observes a thermal Bose distribution at the de Sitter temperature.
We study whether the Hawking-Page phase transition may occur in topological de Sitter spaces (TdS) and Schwarzschild-de Sitter black hole (SdS). We show that at the critical temperature $T=T_1$, TdS with hyperbolic cosmological horizon can make the Hawking-Page transition from the zero mass de Sitter space to TdS. It is also shown that there is no Hawking-Page transition for TdS with Ricci-flat and spherical horizons, when the zero mass de Sitter space is taken as the thermal background. Also we find that the SdS undergoes a different phase transition at T=0 which the Nariai black hole is form…
It is shown that Schwarzschild black hole and de Sitter solutions exist as exact solutions of a recently proposed relativistic covariant formulation of (power-counting) renormalizable gravity with a fluid. The formulation without a fluid is also presented here. The stability of the solutions is studied and their corresponding entropies are computed, by using the covariant Wald method. The area law is shown to hold both for the Schwarzschild and for the de Sitter solutions found, confirming that, for the $β=1$ case, one is dealing with a minimal modification of GR.
We consider the covariant graviton propagator in de Sitter spacetime in a gauge with two parameters, alpha and beta, in the Euclidean approach. We give an explicit form of the propagator with a particular choice of beta but with arbitrary value of alpha. We confirm that two-point functions of local gauge-invariant quantities do not increase as the separation of the two points becomes large.
Hawking radiation from black hole horizon can be viewed as a quantum tunnelling process, and fermions via tunnelling can successfully recover Hawking temperature. In this paper, considering the tunnelling particles with spin 1/2 (namely, Dirac particles), we further improve Kerner and Man's fermion tunnelling method to study Hawking radiation via tunnelling from rotating black holes in de Sitter spaces, specifically including that from Kerr de Sitter black hole and Kerr-Newman de Sitter black hole. As a result, Hawking temperatures at the event horizon (EH) and the cosmological horizon (CH) ar…
It is shown that, for a de Sitter Universe, the Hartle-Hawking (HH) wave function can be obtained in a simple way starting from the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) line element of cosmological equations. An oscillator having imaginary time is indeed derived starting from the Hamiltonian obtaining the HH condition. This proposes again some crucial matter on the meaning of complex time in cosmology. In order to overcome such difficulties, we propose an interpretation of the HH framework based on de Sitter Projective Holography.
We examine the scalar sector of the covariant graviton two-point function in de Sitter spacetime. This sector consists of the pure-trace part and another part described by a scalar field. We show that it does not contribute to two-point functions of gauge-invariant quantities. We also demonstrate that the long-distance growth present in some gauges is absent in this sector for a wide range of gauge parameters.
It was recently pointed out that if an absorbing boundary condition is imposed at infinity, an asymptotically anti-de Sitter Schwarzschild black hole with a spherical horizon takes only a finite amount of time to evaporate away even if its initial mass is arbitrarily large. We show that this is a rather generic property in AdS spacetimes: regardless of their horizon topologies, neutral AdS black holes in general relativity take about the same amount of time to evaporate down to the same size of order L, the AdS length scale. Our discussion focuses on the case in which the black hole has toral …
We adopt the covariant anomaly cancellation method as well as the effective action approach to obtain the Hawking radiation from the Reissner-Nordström blackhole with a global monopole falling in the class of the most general spherically symmetric charged blackhole $(\sqrt{-g}\neq1)$, using only covariant boundary condition at the event horizon.
We investigate Hawking radiation in the novel $4D$ Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity which is recently formulated by Glavan and Lin [Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 081301 (2020)]. We first find the constraints on $α$ and $Λ$ to retain a dS black hole in the spacetime. Both the greybody factor and the power spectra of the Hawking radiation of the massless scalar are studied for the full range of various parameters including the GB coupling constant $α$, the cosmological constant $Λ$ and the constant related to the scalar $ξ$ numerically. In particular, we find the greybody factor is larger for a negative $α…
Robinson-Wilczek's recent work, which treats Hawking radiation as a compensating flux to cancel gravitational anomaly at the horizon of a Schwarzschild-type black hole, is extended to study Hawking radiation of rotating black holes in anti-de Sitter spaces, especially that in dragging coordinate system, via gauge and gravitational anomalies. The results show that in order to restore gauge invariance and general coordinate covariance at the quantum level in the effective field theory, the charge and energy flux by requiring to cancel gauge and gravitational anomalies at the horizon, must have a…
Recently, the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle has been extended to incorporate the existence of a large (cut-off) length scale in de Sitter or anti-de Sitter space, and the Hawking temperatures of the Schwarzshild-(anti) de Sitter black holes have been reproduced by using the extended uncertainty principle. I generalize the extended uncertainty to the case with an absolute minimum length and compute its modification to the Hawking temperature. I obtain a general trend that the generalized uncertainty principle due to the absolute minimum length ``always'' increases the Hawking temperature, …
The correction of Hawking temperature of Schwarzschild-de Sitter (SdS) black hole is investigated using the generalized Klein-Gordon equation and the generalized Dirac equation by taking the quantum gravity effects into account. We derive the corrected Hawking temperatures for scalar particles and fermions crossing the event horizon. The quantum gravity effects prevent the rise of temperature in the SdS black hole. Besides correction of Hawking temperature, the Hawking radiation of SdS black hole is also investigated using massive particles tunneling method. By considering self gravitation eff…
We apply the method of Banerjee and Kulkarni (arXiv:0707.2449, [hep-th]) to provide a derivation of Hawking radiation from the GHS (stringy) blackhole which falls in the class of the most general spherically symmetric blackholes ($\sqrt{-g}\neq 1$) and also the non-extremal $D1-D5$ blackhole using only covariant gravitational anomalies.
We apply the covariant anomaly cancellation method to compute the Hawking fluxes from the event and cosmic horizons of the Schwarzschild-de Sitter black hole. The derivation is new from the existing ones as we split the space in three different regions (near to and away from the event and cosmic horizons) and write down the covariant energy-momentum tensor using three step functions which covers the whole region leading elegantly to the conditions required to compute the Hawking fluxes from the event and cosmic horizons.
We explicitly describe the last stages of black hole evaporation in the context of string theory : the combined study of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) and String Theory (ST) in curved backgrounds allows us to go further in the understanding of quantum gravity effects. The string ``analogue model''(or thermo-dynamical approach) is a well suited framework for this purpose.The results also apply to another physically relevant case: de Sitter background. Semiclassical (QFT) and quantum gravity (String) phases or regimes are properly determined (back reaction effects included). The Hawking-Gibbons tem…
The present paper deals with a reformulation of the derivation of Hawking temperature for static and stationary black holes. In contrast to the conventional approach, where the covariant form of the metrics are used, we use the manifestly non-covariant Jacobi metric for the black holes in question. In the latter, a restricted form of Hamilton-Jacobi variational principle is exploited where the energy of the particle (pertaining to Hawking radiation) appears explicitly in the metric as a constant parameter. Our analysis shows that, as far as computation of Hawking temperature (for stationary bl…
Starting from the chiral covariant effective action approach of Banerjee and Kulkarni [Phys. Lett. B 659, 827(2008)], we provide a derivation of the Hawking radiation from a charged black hole in the presence of gravitational back reaction. The modified expressions for charge and energy flux, due to effect of one loop back reaction are obtained.
We exploit the expression for the anomalous (chiral) effective action to obtain the Hawking radiation from the GHS (stringy) blackhole falling in the class of the most general spherically symmetric blackholes $(\sqrt{-g}\neq1)$, using only covariant boundary condition at the event horizon. The connection between the anomalous and the normal energy-momentum tensors is also established from the effective action approach.
Robinson-Wilczek's recent work shows that, the energy momentum tensor flux required to cancel gravitational anomaly at the event horizon of a Schwarzschild-type black hole has an equivalent form to that of a (1+1)-dimensional blackbody radiation at the Hawking temperature. Motivated by their work, Hawking radiation from the cosmological horizons of the general Schwarzschild-de Sitter and Kerr-de Sitter black holes, has been studied by the method of anomaly cancellation. The result shows that the absorbing gauge current and energy momentum tensor fluxes required to cancel gauge and gravitationa…
We calculate corrections to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula for the five-dimensional topological AdS (TAdS)-black holes and topological de Sitter (TdS) spaces due to thermal fluctuations. We can derive all thermal properties of the TdS spaces from those of the TAdS black holes by replacing $k$ by $-k$. Also we obtain the same correction to the Cardy-Verlinde formula for TAdS and TdS cases including the cosmological horizon of the Schwarzschild-de Sitter (SdS) black hole. Finally we discuss the AdS/CFT and dS/CFT correspondences and their dynamic correspondences.
Recently, Hawking radiation has been treated, by Robinson and Wilczek, as a compensating flux of the energy momentum tensor required to cancel gavitational anomaly at the event horizon(EH) of a Schwarzschild-type black hole. In this paper, motivated by their work, Hawking radiation from the event horizon(EH) and the de Sitter cosmological horizon(CH) of black holes in de Sitter spaces, specifically including the purely de Sitter black hole, and the static, spherically symmetric Schwarzschild-de Sitter black hole as well as the rotating Kerr-de Sitter black hole, has been studied by anomalies. …
The propagators of the Faddeev-Popov (FP) ghosts for Yang-Mills theories and perturbative quantum gravity in the covariant gauge are infrared (IR) divergent in de Sitter spacetime. We point out, however, that the modes responsible for these divergences will not contribute to loop diagrams in computations of time-ordered products in either Yang-Mills theories or perturbative quantum gravity. Therefore we propose that the IR divergent FP-ghost propagator should be regularized by a small mass term that is sent to zero in the end of any perturbative calculations. This proposal is equivalent to usi…
In this article we present results for tensor graviton modes (in seven dimensions and greater, $n\geq 3$) for greybody factors of Kerr-dS black holes and for Hawking radiation from simply rotating (n+4)-dimensional Kerr black holes. Although there is some subtlety with defining the Hawking temperature of a Kerr-dS black hole, we present some preliminary results for emissions assuming the standard Hawking normalization and a Bousso-Hawking-like normalization.
It is commonly known in the literature that large black holes in anti-de Sitter spacetimes (with reflective boundary condition) are in thermal equilibrium with their Hawking radiation. Focusing on black holes with event horizon of toroidal topology, we study a simple model to understand explicitly how this thermal equilibrium is reached under Hawking evaporation. It is shown that it is possible for a large toroidal black hole to evolve into a small (but stable) one.
It is known that the covariant graviton two-point function in de Sitter spacetime is infrared divergent for some choices of gauge parameters. On the other hand it is also known that there are no infrared divergences requiring an infrared cutoff for the physical graviton two-point function for this spacetime in the transverse-traceless-synchronous gauge in the global coordinate system. We show in this paper that the covariant graviton Wightman two-point function with two gauge parameters is equivalent to the physical one in the global coordinate system in the sense that they produce the same tw…
We present a proposal to relate the de Sitter Conjecture (dSC) to the Covariant Entropy Bound (CEB). By assuming an early phase of accelerated expansion where the CEB is satisfied, we take into account a contribution from extra-dimensions to the four-dimensional entropy which restricts the values of the usual slow-roll parameters. We show in this context that the dSC inequalities follow from the CEB -- including their mutual exclusion -- in both single and multi-field inflationary scenarios. We also observe that the order one constants, c and c' in the conjecture are given in terms of physical…
We show that the induced representations of the de Sitter isometry group proposed many years ago by Nachtmann are equivalent to those derived from our general theory of external symmetry. These methods complete each other leading to a coherent theory of covariant fields with spin on the de Sitter spacetime. Some technical details of these representations are presented here for the first time.
Static oscillating bounces in Schwarzschild de Sitter spacetime are investigated. The oscillating bounce with many oscillations gives a super-thick bubble wall, for which the total vacuum energy increases while the mass of the black hole decreases due to the conservation of Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) mass. We show that the transition rate of such an "up-tunneling" consuming the seed black hole is higher than that of the Hawking-Moss transition. The correspondence of analyses in the static and global coordinates in the Euclidean de Sitter space is also investigated.
We obtain microstates accounting for the Gibbons-Hawking entropy in $dS_3$, along with a subleading logarithmic correction, from the solvable $T\bar T+Λ_2$ deformation of a seed CFT with sparse light spectrum. The microstates arise as the dressed CFT states near dimension $Δ=c/6$, associated with the Hawking-Page transition; they dominate the real spectrum of the deformed theory. We exhibit an analogue of the Hawking-Page transition in de Sitter. Appropriate generalizations of the $T\bar T+Λ_2$ deformation are required to treat model-dependent local bulk physics (subleading at large central ch…
In an asymptotically flat spacetime of dimension d > 3 and with the Newtonian gravitational constant G, a spherical black hole of initial horizon radius r_h and mass M ~ r_h^{d-3}/G has a total decay time to Hawking emission of t_d ~ r_h^{d-1}/G ~ G^{2/(d-3)}M^{(d-1)/(d-3)} which grows without bound as the radius r_h and mass M are taken to infinity. However, in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetime with a length scale l and with absorbing boundary conditions at infinity, the total Hawking decay time does not diverge as the mass and radius go to infinity but instead remains bounded by a time…
In the presence of back reaction, we first produce the one-loop corrections for the event horizon and Hawking temperature of the Reissner-Nordström black hole. Then, based on the covariant anomaly cancelation method and the effective action technique, the modified expressions for the fluxes of gauge current and energy momentum tensor, due to the effect of back reaction, are obtained. The results are consistent with the Hawking fluxes of a (1+1)-dimensional blackbody at the temperature with quantum corrections, thus confirming the robustness of the covariant anomaly cancelation method and the e…
In an insightful approach, Robinson and Wilczek proposed that Hawking radiation can be obtained as the compensation of a breakdown of general covariance and gauge invariance and the radiation is a black body radiation at Hawking temperature. We apply this method to two types of black holes in three dimensional spacetime, which share the general form of the metric in that the $tt$ component of the metric is not inverse of the $rr$ component of the metric. First one is the warped $AdS_3$ black hole in three dimensional topologically massive gravity with negative cosmological constant, and second…
The semiclassical effects of antievaporating black holes can be discussed in the framework of $f(R)$ gravity. In particular, the Bousso-Hawking-Nojiri-Odinstov antievaporation instability of degenerate Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes (the so called Nariai space-time) leads to a dynamical increasing of black hole horizon in $f(R)$ gravity. This phenomenon causes the following transition: emitting marginally trapped surfaces become space-like surfaces before the effective Bekenstein-Hawking emission time. As a consequence, Bousso-Hawking thermal radiation cannot be emitted in an antievaporat…
We consider, in de Sitter spacetime, both freely falling and static two-level atoms in interaction with a conformally coupled massless scalar field in the de Sitter-invariant vacuum, and separately calculate the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the atom's spontaneous excitation rate. We find that spontaneous excitations occur even for the freely falling atom as if there is a thermal bath of radiation at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature and we thus recover, in a different physical context, the results of Gibbons and Hawking that reveals the thermal nature of de Sitt…
