Hot scalar radiation setting bounds on the curvature coupling parameter

Abstract

This paper addresses the interplay between vacuum and thermal local averages for massless scalar radiation near a plane wall of a large cavity where the Dirichlet boundary condition is assumed to hold. The main result is that stable thermodynamic equilibrium is possible only if the curvature coupling parameter is restricted to a certain range. In more than three spacetime dimensions such a range contains the conformal coupling, but it does not contain the minimal coupling. Since this same range for possible values of the curvature coupling parameter also applies to massive scalar radiation, it may be relevant in settings where arbitrarily coupled scalar fields are present.

10 pages, LaTeX. Title changed and references added to match the published version. To appear in Classical and Quantum Gravity

References in corpus (3)

• Causality, Analyticity and an IR Obstruction to UV Completion
• Conformal collider physics: Energy and charge correlations
• Viscosity Bound and Causality Violation

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• Thermodynamics of the scalar radiation in the presence of a reflecting plane wall
• Anisotropic motion of an electric dipole in a photon gas near a flat conducting boundary
• Thermodynamic stability in an Einstein universe