Related papers: Quantum Fluctuations and Inertia
Real world quantum systems are open to perpetual influence from the wider environment. Quantum gravitational fluctuations provide a most fundamental source of the environmental influence through their universal interactions with all forms…
It is assumed that, for weak spacetime curvature, the main gravitational effect of the quantum vacuum stress-energy corresponds to adding two terms to the Einstein-Hilbert action, proportional to the square of the curvature scalar and to…
We discuss materials which owe their stability to external fields. These include: 1) external electric or magnetic fields, and 2) quantum vacuum fluctuations in these fields induced by suitable boundary conditions (the Casimir effect).…
The electromagnetic vacuum is known to have energy. It has been recently argued that the quantum vacuum can possess momentum, that adds up to the momentum of matter. This ``Casimir momentum'' is closely related to the Casimir effect, in…
If spacetime undergoes quantum fluctuations, an electromagnetic wavefront will acquire uncertainties in direction as well as phase as it propagates through spacetime. These uncertainties can show up in interferometric observations of…
We explore two hypotheses. First, the possibility that the quantum vacuum energy density of the Casimir effect contributes to a (local) gravitational vacuum energy density. Second, the possibility that a change in the gravitational coupling…
It is generally expected that quantum gravity affects the structure of space-time by introducing stochastic fluctuations in the geometry, and, ultimately, in the measurements of four-distances and four-momenta.These fluctuations may induce…
We treat the effects of quantum field fluctuations on the decay of a meta-stable state of a self-coupled scalar field. We consider two varieties of field fluctuations and their potential effects in a semiclassical description. The first are…
We study cooperative phenomena in the fluctuation-induced forces between a surface and a system of neutral two-level quantum emitters prepared in a coherent collective state, showing that the total Casimir-Polder force on the emitters can…
Between mirrors, the density of electromagnetic modes differs from the one in free space. This changes the radiation properties of an atom as well as the light forces acting on an atom. It has profound consequences in the strong-coupling…
The vacuum (Casimir) energy in quantum field theory is a problem relevant both to new nanotechnology devices and to dark energy in cosmology. The crucial question is the dependence of the energy on the system geometry under study. Despite…
One of the most intriguing manifestations of quantum zero-point fluctuations are the van der Waals and Casimir forces, often associated with vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Here we study generalized fluctuation potentials…
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 consider a system consisting of a quantum, massless, real scalar field, in the presence of nonlinear mirrors: infinite parallel planes, upon which the field satisfies nonlinear boundary conditions. The latter are implemented by…
It is well known that in quantum gravity, the very geometry of space and time is subject to continual fluctuation. The mathematical formulation for this old theory is still lacking. This article formulates this more than forty-year-old…
The fundamental vacuum state of quantum fields, related to Minkowski space, produces divergent fluctuations that must be suppressed in order to bring reality to the description of physical systems. As a consequence, negative vacuum…
A quantum-mechanical framework is set up to describe the full counting statistics of particles flowing between reservoirs in an open system under time-dependent driving. A symmetry relation is obtained which is the consequence of…
Zero-point fluctuations in quantum fields give rise to observable forces between material bodies, the so-called Casimir forces. In this lecture I present some results of the theory of the Casimir effect, primarily formulated in terms of…
We study the mechanical actions affecting close scatterers immersed in a coherent fermionic fluid. Using a scattering field theory, we theoretically analyse the single-scatterer and the two-scatterer case. Concerning the single-scatterer…
In [5] we investigated the response of vacuum energy to a gravitational field by considering a Casimir apparatus in a weak gravitational field. Our approach was based on a conjecture involving the interpretation of spacetime as a refractive…