Physical Mechanisms Underpinning the Vacuum Permittivity

Abstract

The debate about the emptiness of space goes back to the prehistory of science and is epitomized by the Aristotelian ‘horror vacui’, which can be seen as the precursor of the ether, whose modern version is the dynamical quantum vacuum. In this paper, we suggest to change a common view to ‘gaudium vacui’ and discuss how the vacuum fluctuations fix the value of the permittivity, ε0, and permeability, μ0, by modelling their dynamical response by three-dimensional harmonic oscillators.

Zero-Point Energy Density at the Origin of the Vacuum Permittivity and Photon Propagation Time Fluctuation

“…The motivations to enrich virtual fluctuations with fermionantifermion pairs are not new, and overviews can be found in Refs. [10][11][12]. Here, we use virtual fluctuations as a synonym for virtual pairs and mostly consider only fermions and antifermions.…”

“…In Refs. [10,12], it is assumed that the virtual pairs may appear for a short lifetime connected with their energy by the Heisenberg uncertainty relation. The pairs are CPsymmetric, what permits them to have zero values for the total angular momentum, colour, and spin.…”

“…Following Refs. [10,12], one can consider that the first terms in Equations ( 1) and ( 2) are due to the vacuum polarisation and magnetisation, i.e., these terms can also be estimated as the sums of electric and magnetic moments of the virtual fermion pairs.…”

“…For the moments' estimation, the calculations in Refs. [11][12][13] take a shortcut by assuming the oscillation model for the virtual pair with two states separated by 2mc 2 with m the particle mass and c the speed light in the vacuum. The calculations in Ref.…”

Neoclassical models of charged particles

“…The fortuitous, historical development of physics has certainly determined that the study of vacuum was largely neglected. The historical development has also contributed to establish the idea that the study of vacuum can be conducted only by resorting to quantum concepts [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. We cannot exclude beforehand that a better understanding of a 'classical' vacuum is precisely what we need to characterize the quantum-classical border.…”