Thermal Casimir effect in the Einstein Universe with a spherical boundary

TL;DR

This paper calculates the thermal corrections to the Casimir energy for a scalar field in the Einstein universe with a spherical boundary, analyzing thermodynamic behavior at different temperatures.

Contribution

It extends previous zero-temperature Casimir energy results by including thermal fluctuations and thermodynamic quantities using zeta function and Abel-Plana methods.

Findings

At high temperatures, classical and logarithmic contributions dominate the free energy and entropy.

At low temperatures, the free energy and internal energy are dominated by zero-temperature vacuum energy.

Entropy obeys the third law of thermodynamics.

Abstract

In the present paper we investigate thermal fluctuation corrections to the vacuum energy at zero temperature of a conformally coupled massless scalar field whose modes propagate in the Einstein universe with a spherical boundary, characterized by both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. Thus, we generalize the results found in literature in this scenario, which has considered only the vacuum energy at zero temperature. To do this, we use the generalized zeta function method plus Abel-Plana formula and calculate the renormalized Casimir free energy as well as other thermodynamics quantities, namely, internal energy and entropy. For each one of them we also investigate the limits of high and low temperatures. At high temperatures we found that the renormalized Casimir free energy presents classical contributions, along with a logarithmic term. Also in this limit, the internal energy presents a classical contribution and the entropy a logarithmic term in addition to a classical contribution as well. Conversely, at low temperatures, it is shown that both the renormalized Casimir free energy and internal energy are dominated by the vacuum energy at zero temperature. It is also shown that the entropy obeys the third law of thermodynamics.