Wightman function and the Casimir effect for a Robin sphere in a constant curvature space

TL;DR

This paper calculates quantum field effects, including the Wightman function and energy-momentum tensor, for a scalar field with Robin boundary conditions on a sphere in negatively curved space, revealing how curvature influences vacuum fluctuations.

Contribution

It provides new integral representations and eigenvalue decompositions for vacuum expectation values of a scalar field in curved space with spherical boundaries, extending previous flat-space results.

Findings

VEVs decay exponentially with distance from the sphere.

Boundary conditions affect the sign of the field squared VEV.

Vacuum fluctuations are suppressed more strongly in negatively curved space.

Abstract

We evaluate the Wightman function, the mean field squared and the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of the energy-momentum tensor for a scalar field with Robin boundary condition on a spherical shell in the background of a constant negative curvature space. For the coefficient in the boundary condition there is a critical value above which the scalar vacuum becomes unstable. In both interior and exterior regions, the VEVs are decomposed into the boundary-free and sphere-induced contributions. For the latter, rapidly convergent integral representations are provided. In the region inside the sphere, the eigenvalues are expressed in terms of the zeros of the combination of the associated Legendre function and its derivative and the decomposition is achieved by making use of the Abel-Plana type summation formula for the series over these zeros. The sphere-induced contribution to the VEV of the field squared is negative for Dirichlet boundary condition and positive for Neumann one. At distances from the sphere larger than the curvature scale of the background space the suppression of the vacuum fluctuations in the gravitational field corresponding to the negative curvature space is stronger compared with the case of the Minkowskian bulk. In particular, the decay of the VEVs with the distance is exponential for both massive and massless fields. The corresponding results are generalized for spaces with spherical bubbles and for cosmological models with negative curvature spaces.