Calculation of the Regularized Vacuum Energy in Cavity Field Theories

A novel technique based on Schwinger's proper time method is applied to the Casimir problem of the M.I.T. bag model. Calculations of the regularized vacuum energies of massless scalar and Dirac spinor fields confined to a static and spherical cavity are presented in a consistent manner. While our results agree partly with previous calculations based on asymptotic methods, the main advantage of our technique is that the numerical errors are under control. Interpreting the bag constant as a vacuum expectation value, we investigate potential cancellations of boundary divergences between the canonical energy and its bag constant counterpart in the fermionic case. It is found that such cancellations do not occur.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Eur.Phys.J.

Dark matter concentration in the galactic center

It is shown that the matter concentration observed through stellar motion at the galactic center (Eckart & Genzel, 1997, MNRAS, 284, 576 and Genzel et al., 1996, ApJ, 472, 153) is consistent with a supermassive object of $2.5 \times 10^6$ solar masses composed of self-gravitating, degenerate heavy neutrinos, as an alternative to the black hole interpretation. According to the observational data, the lower bounds on possible neutrino masses are $m_\nu \geq 12.0$ keV$/c^2$ for $g=2$ or $m_\nu \geq 14.3$ keV$/c^2$ for $g=1$, where $g$ is the spin degeneracy factor. The advantage of this scenario is that it could naturally explain the low X-ray and gamma ray activity of Sgr A$^*$, i.e. the so called "blackness problem" of the galactic center.Comment: ApJ, 500, 591 (1998), AASTEX, aasms4.sty, v2 reference adde

Cosmological k-essence condensation

We consider a model of dark energy/matter unification based on a k-essence type of theory similar to tachyon condensate models. Using an extension of the general relativistic spherical model which incorporates the effects of both pressure and the acoustic horizon we show that an initially perturbative k-essence fluid evolves into a mixed system containing cold dark matter like gravitational condensate in significant quantities.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, presented by NB at the conference Beyond 2010, Cape Town, 1-6 February 201