Field observables near a fluctuating boundary

Armata, F., Butera, S. , Montalbano, F., Passante, R. and Rizzuto, L. (2023) Field observables near a fluctuating boundary. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2533, 012042. (doi: 10.1088/1742-6596/2533/1/012042)

Abstract

We review several aspects related to the confinement of a massless scalar field in a cavity with a movable conducting wall of finite mass, free to move around its equilibrium position to which it is bound by a harmonic potential, and whose mechanical degrees of freedom are described quantum mechanically. This system, for small displacements of the movable wall from its equilibrium position, can be described by an effective interaction Hamiltonian between the field and the mirror, quadratic in the field operators and linear in the mirror operators. In the interacting, i.e. dressed, ground state, we first consider local field observables such as the field energy density: we evaluate changes of the field energy density in the cavity with the movable wall with respect to the case of a fixed wall, and corrections to the usual Casimir forces between the two walls. We then investigate the case of two one-dimensional cavities separated by a movable wall of finite mass, with two massless scalar fields defined in the two cavities. We show that in this case correlations between the squared fields in the two cavities exist, mediated by the movable wall, at variance with the fixed-wall case.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: R.P. and L.R. acknowledge financial support from the Julian Schwinger Foundation. R.P. and L.R. also acknowledge partial financial support from the FFR2021 grant from the University of Palermo, Italy. S.B. acknowledges funding from the Leverhulme Trust Grant No. ECF-2019461, and from University of Glasgow via the Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith (LKAS) Leadership Fellowship.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Butera, Dr Salvatore
• Authors: Armata, F., Butera, S., Montalbano, F., Passante, R., and Rizzuto, L.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Physics and Astronomy
• Journal Name: Journal of Physics: Conference Series
• Publisher: IOP Publishing Ltd.
• ISSN: 1742-6596
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Author(s)
• First Published: First published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2533:012042
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a creative commons licence