Moving Mirrors and Thermodynamic Paradoxes

Abstract

Quantum fields responding to "moving mirrors" have been predicted to give rise to thermodynamic paradoxes. I show that the assumption in such work that the mirror can be treated as an external field is invalid: the exotic energy-transfer effects necessary to the paradoxes are well below the scales at which the model is credible. For a first-quantized point-particle mirror, it appears that exotic energy-transfers are lost in the quantum uncertainty in the mirror's state. An accurate accounting of these energies will require a model which recognizes the mirror's finite reflectivity, and almost certainly a model which allows for the excitation of internal mirror modes, that is, a second-quantized model.

7 pages, Revtex with Latex2e

References in corpus (3)

• `Operational' Energy Conditions
• The electromagnetic field near a dielectric half-space
• Negative Energy Densities and the Limit of Classical Space-Time

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Do black holes radiate?
• Time Dependence of Particle Creation from Accelerating Mirrors
• How does Casimir energy fall? II. Gravitational acceleration of quantum vacuum energy
• On the duality of Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime and moving mirror
• Quantum channels from reflections on moving mirrors
• Red-shifts near black holes
• On the Reality of Unruh Temperature
• Quantum communication through a partially reflecting accelerating mirror