Boundarylike behaviors of the resonance interatomic energy in a cosmic string spacetime

By generalizing the formalism proposed by Dalibard, Dupont-Roc and Cohen Tannoudji, we study the resonance interatomic energy of two identical atoms coupled to quantum massless scalar fields in a symmetric /antisymmetric entangled state in the Minkowski and cosmic string spacetimes. We find that in both spacetimes, the resonance interatomic energy has nothing to do with the field fluctuations but is attributed to the radiation reaction of the atoms only. We then concretely calculate the resonance interatomic energy of two static atoms near a perfectly reflecting boundary in the Minkowski spacetime and near an infinite and straight cosmic string respectively. We show that the resonance interatomic energy in both cases can be enhanced or suppressed and even nullified as compared with that in an unbounded Minkowski spacetime, because of the presence of the boundary in the Minkowski spacetime or the nontrivial spacetime topological structure of the cosmic string. Besides, we also discover that the resonance interatomic energy in the cosmic string spacetime exhibits some peculiar properties, making it in principle possible to sense different cosmic string spacetimes via the resonance interatomic energy.