6,770 research outputs found
Reheating in the Presence of Noise
Explosive particle production due to parametric resonance is a crucial
feature of reheating in inflationary cosmology. Coherent oscillations of the
inflaton field act as a periodically varying mass in the evolution equation for
matter fields which couple to the inflaton. This in turn results in the
parametric resonance instability. Thermal and quantum noise will lead to a
nonperiodic perturbation in the mass. We study the resulting equation for the
evolution of matter fields and demonstrate that noise (at least if it is
temporally uncorrelated) will increase the rate of particle production. We also
estimate the limits on the magnitude of the noise for which the resonant
behavior is qualitatively unchanged.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures, uses LATE
Particle Creation by a Moving Boundary with Robin Boundary Condition
We consider a massless scalar field in 1+1 dimensions satisfying a Robin
boundary condition (BC) at a non-relativistic moving boundary. We derive a
Bogoliubov transformation between input and output bosonic field operators,
which allows us to calculate the spectral distribution of created particles.
The cases of Dirichlet and Neumann BC may be obtained from our result as
limiting cases. These two limits yield the same spectrum, which turns out to be
an upper bound for the spectra derived for Robin BC. We show that the particle
emission effect can be considerably reduced (with respect to the
Dirichlet/Neumann case) by selecting a particular value for the oscillation
frequency of the boundary position
Inertial forces in the Casimir effect with two moving plates
We combine linear response theory and dimensional regularization in order to
derive the dynamical Casimir force in the low frequency regime. We consider two
parallel plates moving along the normal direction in dimensional space. We
assume the free-space values for the mass of each plate to be known, and obtain
finite, separation-dependent mass corrections resulting from the combined
effect of the two plates. The global mass correction is proportional to the
static Casimir energy, in agreement with Einstein's law of equivalence between
mass and energy for stressed rigid bodies.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure; title and abstract changed; to appear in Physical
Review
Casimir torque between corrugated metallic plates
We consider two parallel corrugated plates and show that a Casimir torque
arises when the corrugation directions are not aligned. We follow the
scattering approach and calculate the Casimir energy up to second order in the
corrugation amplitudes, taking into account nonspecular reflections,
polarization mixing and the finite conductivity of the metals. We compare our
results with the proximity force approximation, which overestimates the torque
by a factor 2 when taking the conditions that optimize the effect. We argue
that the Casimir torque could be measured for separation distances as large as
1 Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, contribution to QFEXT07 proceeding
Lateral Casimir-Polder force with corrugated surfaces
We derive the lateral Casimir-Polder force on a ground state atom on top of a
corrugated surface, up to first order in the corrugation amplitude. Our
calculation is based on the scattering approach, which takes into account
nonspecular reflections and polarization mixing for electromagnetic quantum
fluctuations impinging on real materials. We compare our first order exact
result with two commonly used approximation methods. We show that the proximity
force approximation (large corrugation wavelengths) overestimates the lateral
force, while the pairwise summation approach underestimates it due to the
non-additivity of dispersion forces. We argue that a frequency shift
measurement for the dipolar lateral oscillations of cold atoms could provide a
striking demonstration of nontrivial geometrical effects on the quantum vacuum.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, contribution to QFEXT07 proceeding
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