Spontaneous excitation of a uniformly accelerated atom in the cosmic string spacetime

We study, in the cosmic string spacetime, the average rate of change of energy for an atom coupled to massless scalar fields and uniformly accelerated in a direction parallel to the string in vacuum. We find that both the noninertial motion and the nontrivial global spacetime topology affect the atomic transition rates, so an accelerated atom (an Unruh detector) does feel the string contrary to claims in the literature. We demonstrate that the equivalence between the effect of uniform acceleration and that of thermal radiation on the transition rates of the atom, which is valid in the Minkowski spacetime, holds only on the string.