Quantum fluctuations of the friction force induced by the dynamical Casimir emission

Abstract

We study a quantum model of dynamical Casimir effect in an optical cavity enclosed by a freely moving mirror attached to a harmonic spring. The quantum fluctuations of the friction force exerted by the dynamical Casimir emission onto the moving mirror are investigated, as well as their consequences on the quantum state of the mirror oscillation. Observable signatures of the interplay of the nonlinear nature of the effective mirror-cavity coupling and of the discreteness of the emitted photons are pointed out, in particular as a fast diffusion of the mirror oscillation phase. These results are interpreted in the language of quantum field theories on curved space-times as a breakdown of the standard semiclassical theory of the backreaction.

Fifty Years of the Dynamical Casimir Effect

“…The latter paper triggered hot discussions [231][232][233][234][235]. More recent results can be found in [236][237][238][239][240][241][242][243][244][245][246][247][248][249][250]. In particular, it was shown in [246] that the friction force between two graphene sheets is nonzero only if the relative velocity is larger than the Fermi velocity of the charge carriers in graphene.…”

Cosmological Particle Production: A Review

“…The possible effects of actual moving mirrors in an optical cavity have been discussed in Ref. [133].…”

Feynman diagram approach to dynamical Casimir effect in optimechanical cavity

“…In this section we study the backaction of the vacuum field exerted on the mirror. There are some previous works on the fluctuation of the force with mirror's motion quantized [17,18]. Here we develop a different type of treatment.…”

“…To solve this problem, several regularization methods have been developed [14,16]. In this paper, we tackle the problem from a different angle: we quantize the motion of boundary and treat the whole system as a closed system [17][18][19].…”