Related papers: Magnetically induced vacuum decay
This article summarizes our recent efforts to understand spontaneous quantum vacuum forces and torques, which require that a stationary object be out of thermal equilibrium with the blackbody background radiation. We proceed by a systematic…
Vacuum effects in (2+1)-dimensional quantum electrodynamics (QED) with the topological Chern-Simons term are considered. The photon polarization operator is studied and the decay rate for the electron-positron photoproduction is presented…
We study vacuum in a strong magnetic field. It shows a nonlinear response, as a ferromagnetic medium. Anisotropic pressures arise, and a negative pressure is exerted in the direction perpendicular to the field. The analogy of this effect…
Neutrino masses can be generated radiatively. In such scenarios their masses are calculated by evaluating a self-energy diagram with vanishing external momentum, i.e. taking only the leading order term in a momentum expansion. The…
In this work the spontaneous electromagnetic radiation from atomic systems, induced by dynamical wave-function collapse, is investigated in the X-rays domain. Strong departures are evidenced with respect to the simple cases considered until…
It is known that theories of phantom dark energy, considered as quantum fields, predict a continuous production of positive- plus negative-energy particles, from spontaneous decay of the vacuum. We show that this can be a new source of…
The vacuum energy is calculated for a free, conformally-coupled scalar field on the orbifold space-time \R$\times \S^2/\Gamma$ where $\Gamma$ is a finite subgroup of O(3) acting with fixed points. The energy vanishes when $\Gamma$ is…
We study the contribution to vacuum decay in field theory due to the interaction between the long and short-wavelength modes of the field. The field model considered consists of a scalar field of mass $M$ with a cubic term in the potential.…
Vacuum energies are computed in light-cone field theories to obtain effective potentials which determine vacuum condensate. Quantization surfaces interpolating between the light-like surface and the usual spatial one are useful to define…
Two recent experiments studying the potential effect of entanglement on the emission properties of excited atoms produced in molecular photodissociation have been interpreted in conflicting ways. We present a theoretical analysis of the…
We admit that the vacuum is not empty but is filled with continuously appearing and disappearing virtual fermion pairs. We show that if we simply model the propagation of the photon in vacuum as a series of transient captures within the…
It is commonly agreed that the electromagnetic vacuum is not empty but filled with virtual photons. This leads to effects like Lamb shift and spontaneous emission. Here we argue that if the vacuum has virtual photons it might mean that it…
Effects of fermion-vacuum polarization by a singular configuration of an external static vector field are considered in (2 + 1)-dimensional spacetime. Expressions for the induced vacuum charge and magnetic flux are obtained.
We review a simple technique for evaluating the vacuum energy stemming from non-trivial boundary conditions and review results for the Casimir energy of a massive fermionic field confined in a d+1-dimensional slab-bag and the effect of a…
A QED-based mechanism, breaking translational invariance of the vacuum at sufficiently small distance scales, is suggested as an explanation for the vacuum energy pressure that accelerates the universe. Very-small-scale virtual vacuum…
We discuss the spontaneous breakdown of the vacuum by a strong electromagnetic field as observed in SLAC experiment E-144. We show that the data follow the Schwinger non-perturbative result obtained for a static field.
We consider the vacuum decay by electron-positron pair production in spatially homogeneous, time dependent electric fields by means of quantum kinetic equations. Our focus is on the impact of various pulse shapes as envelopes of oscillating…
We develop a non-conventional description of the vacuum energy in quantum field theory in terms of quantum entropy. Precisely, we show that the vacuum energy of any non-interacting quantum field at zero temperature is proportional to the…
A framework is suggested in which the energy integrals of the Friedmann cosmology are identified as genuine time-independent physical characteristics for both vacuum and non-vacuum forms of cosmic energy. The integrals are found to be…
Magnetic excitations are studied in gapped quantum spin systems, for which spontaneous two-magnon decays are allowed by symmetry. Interaction between one- and two-particle states acquires nonanalytic frequency and momentum dependence near…