Related papers: Restrictions on Negative Energy Density in Flat Sp…
Quantum inequalities bound the extent to which weighted time averages of the renormalized energy density of a quantum field can be negative. They have mostly been proved in flat spacetime, but we need curved-spacetime inequalities to…
Quantum Weak Energy Inequalities (QWEIs) have been established for a variety of quantum field theories in both flat and curved spacetimes. Dirac fields are known (by a result of Fewster and Verch) to satisfy QWEIs under very general…
It is suggested that the Minkowski vacuum of quantum field theories of a large number of fields N would be gravitationally unstable due to strong vacuum energy fluctuations unless an N dependent sub-Planckian ultraviolet momentum cutoff is…
We consider a massive scalar field with a coordinate-dependent mass in higher-dimensional spacetime. The field satisfies Dirichlet boundary conditions on a brane representing the four-dimensional world. Despite being massive, the theory is…
We study the phenomenon of negative energy densities in quantum field theories with self-interaction. Specifically, we consider a class of integrable models (including the sinh-Gordon model) in which we investigate the expectation value of…
We show that a system of a domain wall coupled to a scalar field has static negative energy density at certain distances from the domain wall. This system provides a simple, explicit example of violation of the averaged weak energy…
The so-called "Quantum Inequalities", and the "Quantum Interest Conjecture", use quantum field theory to impose significant restrictions on the temporal distribution of the energy density measured by a time-like observer, potentially…
A `quantum inequality' (a conjectured relation between the energy density of a free quantum field and the time during which this density is observed) has recently been used to rule out some of the macroscopic wormholes and warp drives. I…
We explore the theoretical possibility that dark energy density is derived from the vacuum particle pairs together with the quantum fluctuation of space-time. By assuming the vacuum particle pairs fall into the horizon boundary of the…
Recently a new model of dynamical dark energy, or time-varying $\Lambda$, was proposed by Cai [arXiv:0707.4049] by relating the energy density of quantum fluctuations in a Minkowski space-time, namely $\rho_q \equiv 3 n^2 m_P^2/t^2$, where…
In the semiclassical quantum gravity derived from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, the energy density of a matter field loses quantum coherence due to the induced gauge potential from the parametric interaction with gravity in a non-static…
In classical physics the energy density of a field is always positive. However this does not hold true for quantum physics where the energy density of a field can be locally negative. There are limits on the weighted average of this…
We present evidence that the simplest particle-physics scalar-field models of dynamical dark energy can be separated into distinct behaviors based on the acceleration or deceleration of the field as it evolves down its potential towards a…
Quantum inequalities are lower bounds for local averages of quantum observables that have positive classical counterparts, such as the energy density or the Wick square. We establish such inequalities in general (possibly interacting)…
Perfectly conducting boundaries, and their Dirichlet counterparts for quantum scalar fields, predict nonintegrable energy densities. A more realistic model with a finite ultraviolet cutoff yields two inconsistent values for the force on a…
The imposition of boundary conditions upon a quantized field can lead to singular energy densities on the boundary. We treat the boundaries as quantum mechanical objects with a nonzero position uncertainty, and show that the singular energy…
Negative energy densities in the Dirac field produced by state vectors that are the superposition of two single particle electron states are examined. I show that for such states the energy density of the field is not bounded from below and…
It is considered constraints imposed by the quantum mechanics on the measurement of the density of the electromagnetic energy. First, the energy of the electromagnetic wave and the volume (time) are bound with the Heisenberg uncertainty…
We consider (four dimensional) gravity coupled to a scalar field with potential V(\phi). The potential satisfies the positive energy theorem for solutions that asymptotically tend to a negative local minimum. We show that for a large class…
We treat the probability distributions for quadratic quantum fields, averaged with a Lorentzian test function, in four-dimensional Minkowski vacuum. These distributions share some properties with previous results in two-dimensional…