Dynamical Casimir effect in the worldline formulation

Abstract

We evaluate the effective action for the Dynamical Casimir Effect (DCE) for a real scalar field in $d+1$ dimensions within the worldline formulation of quantum field theory. The scalar field is coupled to a spacetime-dependent mass term, which here plays the role of the moving medium and imposes imperfect boundary conditions on time-dependent surfaces. Expanding in powers of the departure of the geometry from a planar configuration, the worldline path integral factorizes into simpler, lower-dimensional ones. In the limit of a strong coupling to the surface, we recover the Dirichlet result and derive the systematic corrections in inverse powers of the coupling, calculating the imaginary part of the effective action up to arbitrary order of said powers. Finally, we also apply the method to a two-surface configuration.

24 pages, 1 figure, LaTeX

References in corpus (7)

• Perturbative Quantum Field Theory in the String-Inspired Formalism
• Current status of the Dynamical Casimir Effect
• Casimir Effect on the Worldline
• Quantum dissipative effects in moving mirrors: a functional approach
• Quantum dissipative effects in moving imperfect mirrors: sidewise and normal motions
• Hawking radiation inside a rotating black hole
• Commutator technique for the heat kernel of minimal higher derivative operators