Spontaneous excitation of a static multilevel atom coupled with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations in Schwarzschild spacetime

We study the spontaneous excitation of a radially polarized static multilevel atom outside a spherically symmetric black hole in multipolar interaction with quantum electromagnetic fluctuations in the Boulware, Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacuum states. We find that spontaneous excitation does not occur in the Boulware vacuum, and, in contrast to the scalar field case, the spontaneous emission rate is not well behaved at the event horizon as a result of the blow-up of the proper acceleration of the static atom. However, spontaneous excitation can take place both in the Unruh and the Hartle-Hawking vacua as if there were thermal radiation from the black hole. Distinctive features in contrast to the scalar field case are the existence of a term proportional to the proper acceleration squared in the rate of change of the mean atomic energy in the Unruh and the Hartle-Hawking vacua and the structural similarity in the spontaneous excitation rate between the static atoms outside a black hole and uniformly accelerated ones in a flat space with a reflecting boundary, which is particularly dramatic at the event horizon where a complete equivalence exists. (paper)