Casimir Densities for a Massive Fermionic Quantum Field in a Global Monopole Background with Spherical Boundary

We investigate the vacuum expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor associated with a massive fermionic field obeying the MIT bag boundary condition on a spherical shell in the global monopole spacetime. The asymptotic behavior of the vacuum densities is investigated near the sphere center and surface, and at large distances from the sphere. In the limit of strong gravitational field corresponding to small values of the parameter describing the solid angle deficit in global monopole geometry, the sphere-induced expectation values are exponentially suppressed.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 6th Alexander Friedmann International Seminar on Gravitation and Cosmolog

Electronic Phase Separation Transition as the Origin of the Superconductivity and the Pseudogap Phase of Cuprates

We propose a new phase of matter, an electronic phase separation transition that starts near the upper pseudogap and segregates the holes into high and low density domains. The Cahn-Hilliard approach is used to follow quantitatively this second order transition. The resulting grain boundary potential confines the charge in domains and favors the development of intragrain superconducting amplitudes. The zero resistivity transition arises only when the intergrain Josephson coupling $E_J$ is of the order of the thermal energy and phase locking among the superconducting grains takes place. We show that this approach explains the pseudogap and superconducting phases in a natural way and reproduces some recent scanning tunneling microscopy dataComment: 4 pages and 5 eps fig

Euclidean Scalar Green Function in a Higher Dimensional Global Spacetime

We construct the explicit Euclidean scalar Green function associated with a massless field in a higher dimensional global monopole spacetime, i.e., a $(1+d)$-spacetime with $d\geq3$ which presents a solid angle deficit. Our result is expressed in terms of a infinite sum of products of Legendre functions with Gegenbauer polynomials. Although this Green function cannot be expressed in a closed form, for the specific case where the solid angle deficit is very small, it is possible to develop the sum and obtain the Green function in a more workable expression. Having this expression it is possible to calculate the vacuum expectation value of some relevant operators. As an application of this formalism, we calculate the renormalized vacuum expectation value of the square of the scalar field, $_{Ren.}$, and the energy-momentum tensor, $_{Ren.}$, for the global monopole spacetime with spatial dimensions $d=4$ and $d=5$.Comment: 18 pages, LaTex format, no figure