Impact of space-time curvature coupling on the vacuum energy induced by a magnetic topological defect in flat space-time of arbitrary dimension

Abstract

We have investigated vacuum polarization of a quantized charged massive scalar field in the presence of a magnetic topological defect, modeled as an impenetrable tube of finite thickness carrying magnetic flux. At the tube's surface, we imposed a general Robin boundary condition. Our analysis demonstrates that, in flat space-time, the total induced vacuum energy is independent of the coupling $\xi$ of the scalar field's interaction with the space-time curvature only in the special cases of Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. For general Robin boundary conditions, however, the total induced vacuum energy depends on the coupling $\xi$ in a flat space-time and exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the parameter of the Robin boundary condition. We investigated the dependence of this effect not only on Robin's boundary condition parameter, but also on the tube thickness and the space-time dimensionality. We conclude that careful measurements of vacuum polarization effects in flat space-time may, in principle, provide an independent way to probe the $\xi$ coupling.

19 pages, 3 figures

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