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When the vacuum state of a scalar or electromagnetic field is modified by the presence of a reflecting boundary, an interacting test particle undergoes velocity fluctuations. Such effect is regarded as a sort of quantum analog of the…
For the purpose of analyzing observed phenomena, it has been convenient, and thus far sufficient, to regard gravity as subject to the deterministic principles of classical physics, with the gravitational field obeying Newton's law or…
Quantum fluctuations of the vacuum are both a surprising and fundamental phenomenon of nature. Understood as virtual photons flitting in and out of existence, they still have a very real impact, \emph{e.g.}, in the Casimir effects and the…
We summarize several aspects of recent work on quantum stress tensor fluctuations and their role in driving fluctuations of the gravitational field. The role of correlations and anticorrelations is emphasized. We begin with a review of the…
We propose a set of devices of simple geometrical design which may exhibit a permanent rotation due to quantum (vacuum) fluctuations. These objects - which have no moving parts - impose certain boundary conditions on quantum fluctuations…
It is a maxim often stated, yet rarely illustrated, that the combination of special relativity and quantum mechanics necessarily leads to quantum field theory. An elementary illustration is provided, using the familiar particle in a box,…
Quantum gravity is quite elusive at the experimental level; thus a lot of interest has been raised by recent searches for quantum gravity effects in the propagation of light from distant sources, like gamma ray bursters and active galactic…
We consider deformations of quantum mechanical operators by using the novel construction of warped convolutions. The deformation enables us to obtain several quantum mechanical effects where electromagnetic and gravitomagnetic fields play a…
Friction incorporates the close connection between classical mechanics in irreversible thermodynamics. The translation to a quantum mechanical foundation is not trivial and requires a generalization of the Lagrange function. A change to…
Quantum fluctuations on curved spacetimes cause the emission of pairs of particles from the quantum vacuum, as in the Hawking effect from black holes. We use an optical analogue to gravity to investigate the influence of the curvature on…
We investigate the frictional forces due to quantum fluctuations acting on a small sphere rotating near a surface. At zero temperature, we find the frictional force near a surface to be several orders of magnitude larger than that for the…
Newton's action at a distance gravitational law and Coulomb's action at a distance electrostatic law had to be reexamined in the light of field theories which originated from Maxwell's electrodynamics. These ideas were further modified with…
Inertial effects can affect several properties of physical systems. In particular, in the context of quantum mechanics, such effects have been studied in diverse contexts. In this paper, starting from the Schr\"{o}dinger equation for a…
We analyze the quantum fluctuations of vacuum stress tensors and spacetime curvatures, using the framework of linear response theory which connects these fluctuations to dissipation mechanisms arising when stress tensors and spacetime…
We apply recent results on the probability distribution for quantum stress tensor fluctuations to the problem of barrier penetration by quantum particles. The probability for large stress tensor fluctuations decreases relatively slowly with…
The quantum mechanics of position measurement of a macroscopic object is typically inaccessible because of strong coupling to the environment and classical noise. Here we monitor a mechanical resonator subject to an increasingly strong…
We argue that quantum-gravitational fluctuations in the space-time background give the vacuum non-trivial optical properties that include diffusion and consequent uncertainties in the arrival times of photons, causing stochastic…
We examine the dynamics of statistical fluctuations in nuclear matter. Linear response functions for the average phase space density are derived within Landau theory. Properties of the stochastic forces are deduced from the quantal…
An atom moving in a vacuum at constant velocity and parallel to a surface experiences a frictional force induced by the dissipative interaction with the quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. We show that the combination of…
The contribution from quantum vacuum fluctuations of a real massless scalar field to the motion of a test particle that interacts with the field in the presence of a perfectly reflecting flat boundary is here investigated. There is no…