Spontaneous Emission of an Inertial Multi-Level Atom in a Spacetime with a Reflecting Plane Boundary

We calculate the contributions of the vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction to the rate of change of the mean atomic energy for a multi-level hydrogen atom in the multipolar coupling scheme in a spacetime with a reflecting boundary. Our results show that, due to the presence of the boundary, the polarizations of the atom in the parallel direction and in the normal direction are weighted differently in terms of their contributions to the spontaneous emission rate, which is an oscillating function of the atom distance from the boundary. The possible experimental implications of our result are briefly discussed.