On the equivalence between the effective potential and zero-point energy

Abstract

We investigate a possible difference between the effective potential and zero-point energy. We define the zero-point ambiguity (ZPA) as the difference between these two definitions of vacuum energy. Using the zeta function technique in order to obtain renormalized quantities, we show that ZPA vanishes, implying that both of the above definitions of vacuum energy coincide for a large class of geometries and a very general potential. In addition, we show explicitly that an extra term, obtained by E. Myers some years ago for the ZPA, disappears when a scale parameter µ is consistently introduced in all zeta functions in order to keep them dimensionless.