Casimir effect for lattice fermions

Abstract

We propose a definition of the Casimir energy for free lattice fermions. From this definition, we study the Casimir effects for the massless or massive naive fermion, Wilson fermion, and (Möbius) domain-wall fermion in 1 + 1 dimensional spacetime with the spatial periodic or antiperiodic boundary condition. For the naive fermion, we find an oscillatory behavior of the Casimir energy, which is caused by the difference between odd and even lattice sizes. For the Wilson fermion, in the small lattice size of N ≥ 3, the Casimir energy agrees very well with that of the continuum theory, which suggests that we can control the discretization artifacts for the Casimir effect measured in lattice simulations. We also investigate the dependence on the parameters tunable in Möbius domain-wall fermions. Our findings will be observed both in condensed matter systems and in lattice simulations with a small size.