  We consider, in de Sitter spacetime, both freely falling and static two-level
atoms in interaction with a conformally coupled massless scalar field in the de
Sitter-invariant vacuum, and separately calculate the contributions of vacuum
fluctuations and radiation reaction to the atom's spontaneous excitation rate.
We find that spontaneous excitations occur even for the freely falling atom as
if there is a thermal bath of radiation at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature and
we thus recover, in a different physical context, the results of Gibbons and
Hawking that reveals the thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime. Similarly, for
the case of the static atom, our results show that the atom also perceives a
thermal bath which now arises as a result of the intrinsic thermal nature of de
Sitter spacetime and the Unruh effect associated with the inherent acceleration
of the atom.
