Distinguishing de Sitter universe from thermal Minkowski spacetime by Casimir-Polder-like force

We demonstrate that the static ground state atom, which interacts with a conformally coupled massless scalar field in the de Sitter invariant vacuum, can obtain a position-dependent energy-level shift and this shift could cause a Casimir-Polder-like force on it. Interestingly no such force arises on the inertial atom bathed in a thermal radiation in the Minkowski universe. Thus, although the energy-level shifts of the static atom for these two cases are structurally the same, whether the energy-level shift causes the Casimir-Polder-like force, in principle, could be as an indicator to distinguish de Sitter universe from the thermal Minkowski spacetime.Comment: 11 page

Two asymptotic expansions for gamma function developed by Windschitl's formula

In this paper, we develop Windschitl's approximation formula for the gamma function to two asymptotic expansions by using a little known power series. In particular, for $n\in \mathbb{N}$ with $n\geq 4$, we have \begin{equation*} \Gamma \left( x+1\right) =\sqrt{2\pi x}\left( \tfrac{x}{e}\right) ^{x}\left( x\sinh \tfrac{1}{x}\right) ^{x/2}\exp \left( \sum_{k=3}^{n-1}\tfrac{\left( 2k\left( 2k-2\right) !-2^{2k-1}\right) B_{2k}}{2k\left( 2k\right) !x^{2k-1}} +R_{n}\left( x\right) \right) \end{equation*} with \begin{equation*} \left| R_{n}\left( x\right) \right| \leq \frac{\left| B_{2n}\right| }{2n\left( 2n-1\right) }\frac{1}{x^{2n-1}} \end{equation*} for all $x>0$, where $B_{2n}$ is the Bernoulli number. Moreover, we present some approximation formulas for gamma function related to Windschitl's approximation one, which have higher accuracy.Comment: 14 page