Energy Flux Correlations and Moving Mirrors

TL;DR

This paper analyzes quantum stress tensor correlations in a 2D flat spacetime with a moving mirror, revealing subtle flux fluctuation patterns around mean flux pulses of positive and negative energy.

Contribution

It constructs the flux correlation functions for arbitrary mirror trajectories and explores their behavior, highlighting new insights into flux fluctuations in quantum field theory with moving boundaries.

Findings

Correlation functions for fluxes are derived for arbitrary trajectories.

Flux fluctuations reveal subtle correlation changes where mean flux vanishes.

The study provides detailed insights into quantum stress tensor behavior near moving mirrors.

Abstract

We study the quantum stress tensor correlation function for a massless scalar field in a flat two-dimensional spacetime containing a moving mirror. We construct the correlation functions for right-moving and left-moving fluxes for an arbitrary trajectory, and then specialize them to the case of a mirror trajectory for which the expectation value of the stress tensor describes a pair of delta-function pulses, one of negative energy and one of positive energy. The flux correlation function describes the fluctuations around this mean stress tensor, and reveals subtle changes in the correlations between regions where the mean flux vanishes.