Nonlinear dynamical Casimir effect at weak nonstationarity

Abstract

We show that even small nonlinearities significantly affect particle production in the dynamical Casimir effect at large evolution times. To that end, we derive the effective Hamiltonian and resum leading loop corrections to the particle flux in a massless scalar field theory with time-dependent Dirichlet boundary conditions and quartic self-interaction. To perform the resummation, we assume small deviations from the equilibrium and employ a kind of rotating wave approximation. Besides that, we consider a quantum circuit analog of the dynamical Casimir effect, which is also essentially nonlinear. In both cases, loop contributions to the number of created particles are comparable to the tree-level values.