Quantum dissipative effects in moving mirrors: a functional approach

TL;DR

This paper develops a functional approach to analyze quantum dissipative effects in moving mirrors, deriving effective actions and Langevin equations that incorporate noise and dissipation from quantum field interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive functional framework to study quantum effects in moving mirrors, including effective actions and stochastic equations, across different dimensions and field types.

Findings

Computed Euclidean effective action for moving mirrors.

Derived imaginary part of the in-out effective action.

Formulated Langevin equation with noise and dissipation effects.

Abstract

We use a functional approach to study various aspects of the quantum effective dynamics of moving, planar, dispersive mirrors, coupled to scalar or Dirac fields, in different numbers of dimensions. We first compute the Euclidean effective action, and use it to derive the imaginary part of the `in-out' effective action. We also obtain, for the case of the real scalar field in 1+1 dimensions, the Schwinger-Keldysh effective action and a semiclassical Langevin equation that describes the motion of the mirror including noise and dissipative effects due to its coupling to the quantum fields.