Functional approach to the dynamical Casimir effect

F.C. LOMBARDO

University of Leipzig, Germany

Workshop; " Functional approach to the dynamical Casimir effect", Workshop on QUANTUM FIELD THEORY UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF EXTERNAL CONDITIONS; 2007

   We use a functional approach to study various aspects of the quantum effective dynamics of moving,planar, dispersive mirrors, coupled to scalar or Dirac fields, in different numbers of dimensions. We firstcompute the Euclidean effective action, and use it to derive the imaginary part of the ``in-out´´ effectiveaction. We also obtain, for the case of the real scalar field in 1  1 dimensions, the Schwinger-Keldysheffective action and a semiclassical Langevin equation that describes the motion of the mirror includingnoise and dissipative effects due to its coupling to the quantum fields.