Induced fermionic current in toroidally compactified spacetimes with applications to cylindrical and toroidal nanotubes

The vacuum expectation value of the fermionic current is evaluated for a massive spinor field in spacetimes with an arbitrary number of toroidally compactified spatial dimensions in presence of a constant gauge field. By using the Abel-Plana type summation formula and the zeta function technique we present the fermionic current in two different forms. Non-trivial topology of the background spacetime leads to the Aharonov-Bohm effect on the fermionic current induced by the gauge field. The current is a periodic function of the magnetic flux with the period equal to the flux quantum. In the absence of the gauge field it vanishes for special cases of untwisted and twisted fields. Applications of the general formulae to Kaluz-Klein type models and to cylindrical and toroidal carbon nanotubes are given. In the absence of magnetic flux the total fermionic current in carbon nanotubes vanishes, due to the cancellation of contributions from two different sublattices of the graphene hexagonal lattice.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, explicit regularization procedure adde

Fermionic Casimir effect for parallel plates in the presence of compact dimensions with applications to nanotubes

We evaluate the Casimir energy and force for a massive fermionic field in the geometry of two parallel plates on background of Minkowski spacetime with an arbitrary number of toroidally compactified spatial dimensions. The bag boundary conditions are imposed on the plates and periodicity conditions with arbitrary phases are considered along the compact dimensions. The Casimir energy is decomposed into purely topological, single plate and interaction parts. With independence of the lengths of the compact dimensions and the phases in the periodicity conditions, the interaction part of the Casimir energy is always negative. In order to obtain the resulting force, the contributions from both sides of the plates must be taken into account. Then, the forces coming from the topological parts of the vacuum energy cancel out and only the interaction term contributes to the Casimir force. Applications of the general formulae to Kaluza-Klein type models and carbon nanotubes are given. In particular, we show that for finite length metallic nanotubes the Casimir forces acting on the tube edges are always attractive, whereas for semiconducting-type ones they are attractive for small lengths of the nanotube and repulsive for large lengths.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

Thermal Casimir effect for neutrino and electromagnetic fields in closed Friedmann cosmological model

We calculate the total internal energy, total energy density and pressure, and the free energy for the neutrino and electromagnetic fields in Einstein and closed Friedmann cosmological models. The Casimir contributions to all these quantities are separated. The asymptotic expressions for both the total internal energy and free energy, and for the Casimir contributions to them are found in the limiting cases of low and high temperatures. It is shown that the neutrino field does not possess a classical limit at high temperature. As for the electromagnetic field, we demonstrate that the total internal energy has the classical contribution and the Casimir internal energy goes to the classical limit at high temperature. The respective Casimir free energy contains both linear and logarithmic terms with respect to the temperature. The total and Casimir entropies for the neutrino and electromagnetic fields at low temperature are also calculated and shown to be in agreement with the Nernst heat theorem.Comment: 23 pages, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Casimir energy and a cosmological bounce

We review different computation methods for the renormalised energy momentum tensor of a quantised scalar field in an Einstein Static Universe. For the extensively studied conformally coupled case we check their equivalence; for different couplings we discuss violation of different energy conditions. In particular, there is a family of masses and couplings which violate the weak and strong energy conditions but do not lead to spacelike propagation. Amongst these cases is that of a minimally coupled massless scalar field with no potential. We also point out a particular coupling for which a massless scalar field has vanishing renormalised energy momentum tensor. We discuss the backreaction problem and in particular the possibility that this Casimir energy could both source a short inflationary epoch and avoid the big bang singularity through a bounce.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX, 8 figure

Space-Time Description of Scalar Particle Creation by a Homogeneous Isotropic Gravitational Field

We give the generalization of the method of the space-time description of particle creation by a gravitational field for a scalar field with nonconformal coupling to the curvature. The space-time correlation function is obtained for a created pair of the quasi-particles, corresponding to a diagonal form of the instantaneous Hamiltonian. The case of an adiabatic change of the metric of homogeneous isotropic space is analyzed. We show that the created pairs of quasi-particles in de Sitter space should be interpreted as pairs of virtual particles.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Multidimensional cut-off technique, odd-dimensional Epstein zeta functions and Casimir energy of massless scalar fields

Quantum fluctuations of massless scalar fields represented by quantum fluctuations of the quasiparticle vacuum in a zero-temperature dilute Bose-Einstein condensate may well provide the first experimental arena for measuring the Casimir force of a field other than the electromagnetic field. This would constitute a real Casimir force measurement - due to quantum fluctuations - in contrast to thermal fluctuation effects. We develop a multidimensional cut-off technique for calculating the Casimir energy of massless scalar fields in $d$-dimensional rectangular spaces with $q$ large dimensions and $d-q$ dimensions of length $L$ and generalize the technique to arbitrary lengths. We explicitly evaluate the multidimensional remainder and express it in a form that converges exponentially fast. Together with the compact analytical formulas we derive, the numerical results are exact and easy to obtain. Most importantly, we show that the division between analytical and remainder is not arbitrary but has a natural physical interpretation. The analytical part can be viewed as the sum of individual parallel plate energies and the remainder as an interaction energy. In a separate procedure, via results from number theory, we express some odd-dimensional homogeneous Epstein zeta functions as products of one-dimensional sums plus a tiny remainder and calculate from them the Casimir energy via zeta function regularization.Comment: 42 pages, 3 figures. v.2: typos corrected to match published versio

Vacuum fluctuations and topological Casimir effect in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmologies with compact dimensions

We investigate the Wightman function, the vacuum expectation values of the field squared and the energy-momentum tensor for a massless scalar field with general curvature coupling parameter in spatially flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universes with an arbitrary number of toroidally compactified dimensions. The topological parts in the expectation values are explicitly extracted and in this way the renormalization is reduced to that for the model with trivial topology. In the limit when the comoving lengths of the compact dimensions are very short compared to the Hubble length, the topological parts coincide with those for a conformal coupling and they are related to the corresponding quantities in the flat spacetime by standard conformal transformation. In the opposite limit of large comoving lengths of the compact dimensions, in dependence of the curvature coupling parameter, two regimes are realized with monotonic or oscillatory behavior of the vacuum expectation values. In the monotonic regime and for nonconformally and nonminimally coupled fields the vacuum stresses are isotropic and the equation of state for the topological parts in the energy density and pressures is of barotropic type. In the oscillatory regime, the amplitude of the oscillations for the topological part in the expectation value of the field squared can be either decreasing or increasing with time, whereas for the energy-momentum tensor the oscillations are damping.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure