Dependence of the vacuum energy on spherically symmetric background fields

Abstract

The vacuum energy of a scalar field in a spherically symmetric background field is considered. Based on previous work [hep-th/9608070], the numerical procedure is refined further and applied to several examples. We provide numerical evidence that repulsive potentials lead to positive contributions to the vacuum energy. Furthermore, the crucial role played by bound-states is clearly seen.

12 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Zeta Functions and the Casimir Energy
• On the ground state energy for a penetrable sphere and for a dielectric ball

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