Casimir energy of massive MIT fermions in a Bohm-Aharonov background

We study the effect of a background flux string on the vacuum energy of massive Dirac fermions in 2+1 dimensions confined to a finite spatial region through MIT boundary conditions. We treat two admissible self-adjoint extensions of the Hamiltonian and compare the results. In particular, for one of these extensions, the Casimir energy turns out to be discontinuous at integer values of the flux.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure