Recently Randjbar-Daemi and Shaposhnikov put forward a 4-dimensional effective QED coming from a Nielsen-Olesen vortex solution of the abelian Higgs model with fermions coupled to gravity in D=6. However, exploring possible physical consequences of such an effective QED was left open. In this letter we study the corresponding effective Casimir effect. We find that the extra dimensions yield fifth and third inverse powers in the separation between plates for the modified Casimir force which are in conflict with known experiments, thus reducing the phenomenological viability of the model.
We compute the one-loop Casimir energy of gravity and matter fields, obeying various boundary conditions, in 5-dimensional S^1/Z_2 and 6-dimensional T^2/Z_k orbifolds. We discuss the role of the Casimir energy in possible radius stabilization mechanisms and show that the presence of massive as well as massless fields can lead to minima with zero cosmological constant. In the 5-d orbifold, we also consider the case where kinetic terms localized at the fixed points are not small. We take into account their contribution to the Casimir energy and show that localized kinetic terms can also provide a mechanism for radius stabilization. We apply our results to a recently proposed 5-dimensional supersymmetric model of electroweak symmetry breaking and show that the Casimir energy with the minimal matter content is repulsive. Stabilizing the radius with zero cosmological constant requires, in this context, adding positive bulk cosmological constant and negative brane-tension counterterms.
We investigate quantum vacuum effects for a massive scalar field, induced by two planar boundaries in background of a linearly expanding spatially flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime for an arbitrary number of spatial dimensions. For the Robin boundary conditions and for general curvature coupling parameter, a complete set of mode functions is presented and the related Hadamard function is evaluated. The results are specified for the most important special cases of the adiabatic and conformal vacuum states. The vacuum expectation values of the field squared and of the energy-momentum tensor are investigated for a massive conformally coupled field. The vacuum energy-momentum tensor, in addition to the diagonal components, has nonzero off-diagonal component describing energy flux along the direction perpendicular to the plates. The influence of the gravitational field on the local characteristics of the vacuum state is essential at distances from the boundaries larger than the curvature radius of the background spacetime. In contrast to the Minkowskian bulk, at large distances the boundary-induced expectation values follow as power law for both massless and massive fields. Another difference is that the Casimir forces acting on the separate plates do not coincide if the corresponding Robin coefficients are different. At large separations between the plates the decay of the forces is power law. We show that during the cosmological expansion the forces may change the sign.
Finite-volume effects for the nucleon chiral partners are studied within the framework of the parity-doublet model. Our model includes the vacuum energy shift for nucleons, which is the Casimir effect. We find that for the antiperiodic boundary the finite-volume effect leads to chiral symmetry restoration, and the masses of the nucleon parity doublets degenerate. For the periodic boundary, the chiral symmetry breaking is enhanced, and the masses of the nucleons also increase. We also discuss the finite-temperature effect and the dependence on the number of compactified spatial dimensions.
We investigate the influence of a dark photon on the Casimir effect. For expected magnitudes of the photon - dark photon mixing parameter, the influence turns out to be negligible. The plasmon dispersion relation is also not noticeably modified by the presence of a dark photon.
Non-homogeneous gauge ground state solutions in a six-dimensional gauge model in the presence of non-zero extended fermionic charge density fluctuations are reviewed and fully reinterpreted.