The contribution of vacuum fluctuations and the radiation reaction to the energy-level shifts of a hydrogen atom, moving with uniform acceleration and interacting with the electromagnetic field, is considered. It is found that the reaction field contribution is not affected by the acceleration, whereas the vacuum fluctuations' contribution depends on the acceleration. The differences with previous results for an accelerated two-level atom interacting with a scalar field are discussed in detail; in particular, it is shown that the effect of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations on atomic level shifts, contrarily to the scalar field case, is not totally equivalent to that of a thermal field. It is argued that this lack of equivalence should be observable.
We investigate the effect of the GUP on the Lamb shift of a two-level atom interacting with a real massless scalar quantum field, within the DDC formalism. For an atom undergoing inertial motion, uniform acceleration, and uniform circular motion, we analyze the separate contributions of vacuum fluctuations and radiation reaction. We first derive the statistical functions of the field along the atom's trajectories for the three types of motion, expressing them as frequency integrals, and then employ them to calculate the vacuum fluctuation and radiation reaction contributions to the radiative level shift. We show that the GUP-modified Lamb shift of the two-level atom arises entirely from vacuum fluctuations and acquires additional corrections proportional to
β. We focus in particular on the acceleration-dependent GUP corrections. For a uniformly accelerated atom, the GUP corrections comprise thermal and nonthermal parts. At low accelerations, the thermal part exhibits nonmonotonic behavior, and is proportional to
a4 in the limit
a/ω0→0; the nonthermal part, by contrast, grows nonlinearly and monotonically, exceeding the thermal part by nearly two orders of magnitude at large accelerations. For an atom in uniform circular motion, the GUP corrections are purely nonthermal and also display a nonlinear, monotonic dependence on acceleration, increasing or decreasing steeply according to the sign of
β. For the same
β, the corrections are larger in uniform circular motion than in uniformly accelerated motion, since the former involves terms proportional to both
a2 and
a3, whereas the latter contains only
a2 terms.