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Mesoscopic Casimir forces in quantum vacuum

  • Gravity, Astrophysics
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Abstract

Traditionally, it is assumed that the Casimir vacuum pressure does not depend on the ultraviolet cutoff. There are, however, some arguments that the effect actually depends on the regularization procedure and thus on trans-Planckian physics. We provide the condensed matter example where the Casimir forces do explicitly depend on microscopic (correspondingly trans-Planckian) physics due to the mesoscopic finite-N effects, where N is the number of bare particles in condensed matter (or correspondingly the number of elements comprising the quantum vacuum). The finite-N effects lead to mesoscopic fluctuations of the vacuum pressure. The amplitude of the mesoscopic fluctuations of the Casimir force in a system with linear dimension L is a factor of N 1/3∼L/a p larger than the traditional value of the Casimir force given by effective theory, where a p =ℏ/p p is the interatomic distance which plays the role of the Planck length.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland

    G. E. Volovik

  2. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 117940, Russia

    G. E. Volovik

Authors
  1. G. E. Volovik
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Additional information

From Pis’ma v Zhurnal Éksperimental’no\(\overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\smile}$}}{l} \) i Teoretichesko\(\overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\smile}$}}{l} \) Fiziki, Vol. 73, No. 8, 2001, pp. 419–423.

Original English Text Copyright © 2001 by Volovik.

This article was submitted by the author in English.

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Volovik, G.E. Mesoscopic Casimir forces in quantum vacuum. Jetp Lett. 73, 375–379 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1134/1.1381589

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/1.1381589

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