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

Analogue Hawking Radiation and Sine-Gordon Soliton in a Superconducting Circuit

We propose the use of a waveguide-like transmission line based on direct-current superconducting quantum interference devices (dc-SQUID) and study the sine-Gordon (SG) equation which characterises the dynamical behavior of the superconducting phase in this transmission line. Guided by the duality between black holes in Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) dilaton gravity and solitons in sine-Gordon field theory, we show how to, in our setup, realize 1 + 1 dimensional black holes as solitons of the sine-Gordon equation. We also study the analogue Hawking radiation in terms of the quantum soliton evaporation, and analyze its feasibility within current circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) technology. Our results may not only facilitate experimentally understanding the relation between Jackiw-Teitelboim dilaton gravity and sine-Gordon field theory, but also pave a new way, in principle, for the exploration of analogue quantum gravitational effects.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure