Spinor Casimir effect for concentric spherical shells in the global monopole spacetime

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the vacuum polarization effects associated with a massive fermionic field due to the non-trivial topology of the global monopole spacetime and boundary conditions imposed on this field. Specifically, we investigate the vacuum expectation values of the energy–momentum tensor and fermionic condensate admitting that the field obeys the MIT bag boundary condition on two concentric spherical shells. In order to develop this analysis, we use the generalized Abel–Plana summation, which allows us to extract from the vacuum expectation values the contribution coming from a single sphere geometry and to present the second sphere induced part in terms of exponentially convergent integrals. In the limit of strong gravitational fields corresponding to small values of the parameter describing the solid angle deficit in a global monopole geometry, the interference part in the expectation values is exponentially suppressed. The vacuum forces acting on spheres are presented as the sum of self-action and interaction terms. Due to the surface divergences, the first one is divergent and needs additional renormalization, while the second one is finite for all non-zero distances between the spheres. By making use of the zeta function renormalization technique, the total Casimir energy is evaluated in the region between two spheres. It is shown that the interaction part of the vacuum energy is negative and the interaction forces between the spheres are attractive. Asymptotic expressions are derived in various limiting cases. As a special case we discuss the fermionic vacuum densities for two spherical shells on background of the Minkowski spacetime.