Spontaneous excitation of a detector in circular motion coupled to massless Rarita-Schwinger fields in vacuum

We study the spontaneous excitation of a detector (modeled by a two-level atom) in circular motion coupled nonlinearly to vacuum massless Rarita-Schwinger fields in the ultrarelativistic limit and demonstrate that the spontaneous excitation occurs for ground-state atoms in circular motion in vacuum but the excitation rate is not of a pure thermal form as that of the atoms in linear uniform acceleration. An interesting feature is that terms of odd powers in acceleration appear in the excitation rate whereas in the linear acceleration case there are only terms of even powers present. On the other hand, what makes the present case unique in comparison to the atom's coupling to other fields that are previously studied is the appearance of the terms proportional to the seventh and ninth powers of acceleration in the mean rate of change of atomic energy which are absent in the scalar, electromagnetic and Dirac field cases. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.