Casimir phenomena in bumblebee gravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Casimir effect in black hole spacetimes within bumblebee gravity, revealing how Lorentz-violating parameters influence vacuum energy and pressure near horizons and inside black holes.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of Casimir phenomena in bumblebee gravity, deriving explicit formulas and exploring effects of Lorentz violation on vacuum energy in various black hole configurations.

Findings

Casimir energy depends on bumblebee parameters and position relative to the horizon.

Near the horizon, Casimir energy vanishes and pressure diverges.

Inside black holes, Casimir interaction can switch between attractive and repulsive.

Abstract

In this work, we analyze the Casimir effect associated with a massive, non-minimally coupled scalar field in static, spherically symmetric black hole spacetimes arising in bumblebee gravity. Three distinct solutions are considered, corresponding to different vacuum expectation value configurations of the Lorentz-violating vector field, including metric and \textit{metric-affine} scenarios. Finite-size effects are implemented through the Thermo Field Dynamics formalism by compactifying the radial direction, allowing the construction of renormalized vacuum expectation values of the energy-momentum tensor. Closed-form expressions for the Casimir energy and pressure are obtained in the massless limit as functions of the radial position of a spherical capacitor and the plate separation. Both observables depend explicitly on the bumblebee parameters and on the location of the apparatus relative to the horizon $R_0=2M$. In the weak-field regime, $r \gg R_0$, the standard flat-space behavior $E \propto -1/d^4$ is recovered. As $r \to R_0$, the Casimir energy vanishes while the radial pressure diverges. Inside the black hole, the interaction may alternate between attractive and repulsive regimes depending on the plate separation and on the Lorentz-violating couplings. A domain-dependent hierarchy among the three configurations emerges, with \textit{metric-affine} effects amplifying the interior vacuum energy, while configurations with simultaneous temporal and radial deformations dominate in the exterior region. Although all geometries share the same asymptotic Schwarzschild structure, their quantitative deviations become increasingly pronounced as the Lorentz-violating parameters grow.