Electromagnetic Casimir effect and the spacetime index of refraction

Abstract

In [M. Nouri-Zonoz and B. Nazari, Phys. Rev. D 82, 044047 (2010)], we investigated the response of vacuum energy to a gravitational field by considering a Casimir apparatus in a weak gravitational field. Our approach was based on a conjecture involving the interpretation of spacetime as a refractive medium and its effect on vacuum energy composed of virtual massless scalar particles. There it was shown how the case of virtual photons as the constituents of vacuum could be inferred from that of the massless scalar field. Here we explicitly show how the same conjecture applies to the electromagnetic vacuum composed of virtual photons. Specifically, we show that the boundary conditions imposed on the components of the vector field, decomposed into two scalar fields, result in the same frequency shift for photons. Using the same decomposition and employing our conjecture, we also calculate the electromagnetic energy density for the Casimir apparatus in a weak gravitational field.