Inhibition of the dynamical Casimir effect with Robin boundary conditions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Robin boundary conditions can suppress the dynamical Casimir effect in a 3+1 dimensional setting, providing explicit calculations of particle creation and demonstrating conditions for significant inhibition.

Contribution

It extends previous 1+1 dimensional results to 3+1 dimensions, showing Robin boundary conditions can significantly reduce particle creation in the dynamical Casimir effect.

Findings

Particle creation rate can be reduced for specific Robin parameters.

The angular dependence of particle emission is characterized.

Results generalize known Dirichlet and Neumann cases.

Abstract

We consider a real massless scalar field in 3+1 dimensions satisfying a Robin boundary condition at a nonrelativistic moving mirror. Considering vacuum as the initial field state, we compute explicitly the number of particles created per unit frequency and per unit solid angle, exhibiting in this way the angular dependence of the spectral distribution. The well known cases of Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions may be reobtained as particular cases from our results. We show that the particle creation rate can be considerably reduced (with respect to the Dirichlet and Neumann cases) for particular values of the Robin parameter. Our results extend for 3+1 dimensions previous results found in the literature for 1+1 dimensions. Further, we also show that this inhibition of the dynamical Casimir effect occurs for different angles of particle emission.