Spontaneous Emission of an Atom in a Spacetime with Two Parallel Reflecting Boundaries

We consider an inertial two-level atom in interaction with a real massless scalar quantum field in a spacetime between two parallel reflecting plane boundaries, and calculate the contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the rate of change of the atomic energy. Our results show that there exists a regime of the separation L between the two boundaries such that the excited atom's spontaneous emission is impossible. There also exist certain values of the atom's position such that the corrections due to the presence of boundaries balance each other, so that the atom's spontaneous emission rate is the same as if there were no boundaries at all.