Semi-transparent Boundary Conditions in the Worldline Formalism

The interaction of a quantum field with a background containing a Dirac delta function with support on a surface of codimension 1 represents a particular kind of matching conditions on that surface for the field. In this article we show that the worldline formalism can be applied to this model. We obtain the asymptotic expansion of the heat-kernel corresponding to a scalar field on $\mathbb{R}^{d+1}$ in the presence of an arbitrary regular potential and subject to this kind of matching conditions on a flat surface. We also consider two such surfaces and compute their Casimir attraction due to the vacuum fluctuations of a massive scalar field weakly coupled to the corresponding Dirac deltas.Comment: 12 page

Boundaries in the Moyal plane

We study the oscillations of a scalar field on a noncommutative disc implementing the boundary as the limit case of an interaction with an appropriately chosen confining background. The space of quantum fluctuations of the field is finite dimensional and displays the rotational and parity symmetry of the disc. We perform a numerical evaluation of the (finite) Casimir energy and obtain similar results as for the fuzzy sphere and torus.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures. Replaced by published versio

Casimir effect in Snyder Space

We show that two indistinguishable aspects of the divergences occurring in the Casimir effect, namely the divergence of the energy of the higher modes and the non-com\-pact\-ness of the momentum space, get disentangled in a given noncommutative setup. To this end, we consider a scalar field between two parallel plates in an anti-Snyder space. Additionally, the large mass decay in this noncommutative setup is not necessarily exponential.Comment: 15 pages, discussion regarding the large-mass asymptotics added, typos corrected, missing factor in eq. (1) correcte

All-carbon multi-electrode array for real-time in vitro measurements of oxidizable neurotransmitters

We report on the ion beam fabrication of all-carbon multi electrode arrays (MEAs) based on 16 graphitic micro-channels embedded in single-crystal diamond (SCD) substrates. The fabricated SCD-MEAs are systematically employed for the in vitro simultaneous amperometric detection of the secretory activity from populations of chromaffin cells, demonstrating a new sensing approach with respect to standard techniques. The biochemical stability and biocompatibility of the SCD-based device combined with the parallel recording of multi-electrodes array allow: i) a significant time saving in data collection during drug screening and/or pharmacological tests over a large number of cells, ii) the possibility of comparing altered cell functionality among cell populations, and iii) the repeatition of acquisition runs over many cycles with a fully non-toxic and chemically robust bio-sensitive substrate.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure

Trace anomalies for Weyl fermions: too odd to be true?

We review recent discussions regarding the parity-odd contribution to the trace anomaly of a chiral fermion. We pay special attention to the perturbative approach in terms of Feynman diagrams, comparing in detail the results obtained using dimensional regularization and the Breitenlohner--Maison prescription with other approaches.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures. Contribution to "Avenues of Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime", Genoa, 2022. Partially based on 2101.11382 [hep-th