Null second order corrections to Casimir energy in weak gravitational field

Abstract

The discussion of vacuum energy is currently a subject of great theoretical importance, specially concerning the cosmological constant problem in General Relativity. From Quantum Field Theory, it is stated that vacuum states subject to boundary conditions may generate tensions on these boundaries related to a measurable non-zero renormalized vacuum energy: the Casimir effect. As such, investigating how these vacuum states and energy behave in curved backgrounds is just natural and might provide important results in the near future. In this paper we revisit a model of the Casimir effect for a massless scalar field in a weak gravitational field background, with rectangular Dirichlet boundaries, which has been proposed and further generalized in the literature. A trick originally used to simplify calculations is shown to lead to a inconsistent value for the energy shift, and by performing explicit mode expansion we arrive at an unexpected result: null gravitational correction even at order (M/R)2, in opposition to earlier results.