Abstract
The Casimir energy of a massive Dirac field at finite temperature and confined between two parallel infinite plates is computed using a method proposed by Schwinger. The boundary conditions are those of zero current through the plates, as inspired by quark confinement in the MIT bag model for hadrons. We use Schwinger's original regularization by a cutoff in proper-time. We comment on the analytical continuation method of regularization, which allows the employment of Epstein function techniques, and on the different possible expressions for the final answer.
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Cougo-Pinto, M.V., Farina, C. & Tort, A. Schwinger's method for the fermionic Casimir effect at finite temperature. Lett Math Phys 38, 337–340 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00398358
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00398358