No Arabic abstract
We review and assess a part of the recent work on Casimir apparatuses in the weak gravitational field of the Earth. For a free, real massless scalar field subject to Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions on the parallel plates, the resulting regularized and renormalized energy-momentum tensor is covariantly conserved, while the trace anomaly vanishes if the massless field is conformally coupled to gravity. Conformal coupling also ensures a finite Casimir energy and finite values of the pressure upon parallel plates. These results have been extended to an electromagnetic field subject to perfect conductor (hence idealized) boundary conditions on parallel plates, by various authors. The regularized and renormalized energy-momentum tensor has been evaluated up to second order in the gravity acceleration. In both the scalar and the electromagnetic case, studied to first order in the gravity acceleration, the theory predicts a tiny force in the upwards direction acting on the apparatus. This effect is conceptually very interesting, since it means that Casimir energy is indeed expected to gravitate, although the magnitude of the expected force makes it necessary to overcome very severe signal-modulation problems.
We consider a Casimir apparatus consisting of two perfectly conducting parallel plates, subject to the weak gravitational field of the Earth. The aim of this paper is the calculation of the energy-momentum tensor of this system for a free, real massless scalar field satisfying Neumann boundary conditions on the plates. The small gravity acceleration (here considered as not varying between the two plates) allows us to perform all calculations to first order in this parameter. Some interesting results are found: a correction, depending on the gravity acceleration, to the well-known Casimir energy and pressure on the plates. Moreover, this scheme predicts a tiny force in the upwards direction acting on the apparatus. These results are supported by two consistency checks: the covariant conservation of the energy-momentum tensor and the vanishing of its regularized trace, when the scalar field is conformally coupled to gravity.
The influence of the gravity acceleration on the regularized energy-momentum tensor of the quantized electromagnetic field between two plane parallel conducting plates is derived. A perturbative expansion, to first order in the constant acceleration parameter, of the Green functions involved and of the energy-momentum tensor is derived by means of the covariant geodesic point splitting procedure. The energy-momentum tensor is covariantly conserved and satisfies the expected relation between gauge-breaking and ghost parts.
In this paper we consider a Lorentz-breaking extension of the theory for a real massive scalar quantum field in the region between two large parallel plates, with our manner to break the Lorentz symmetry is CPT-even, aether-like. For this system we calculated the Casimir energy considering different boundary conditions. It turns out to be that the Casimir energy strongly depends on the direction of the constant vector implementing the Lorentz symmetry breaking, as well as on the boundary conditions.
In this paper, we evaluate the Casimir energy and pressure for a massive fermionic field confined in the region between two parallel plates. In order to implement this confinement we impose the standard MIT bag boundary on the plates for the fermionic field. In this paper we consider a quantum field theory model with a CPT even, aether-like Lorentz symmetry violation. It turns out that the fermionic Casimir energy and pressure depend on the direction of the constant vector that implements the Lorentz symmetry breaking.
The weak-field expansion of the charged fermion propagator under a uniform magnetic field is studied. Starting from Schwingers proper-time representation, we express the charged fermion propagator as an infinite series corresponding to different Landau levels. This infinite series is then reorganized according to the powers of the external field strength $B$. For illustration, we apply this expansion to $gammato ubar{ u}$ and $ uto ugamma$ decays, which involve charged fermions in the internal loop. The leading and subleading magnetic-field effects to the above processes are computed.